The Strange Continenthttp://thestrangecontinent.com
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3232121267446Great Empires of North America, Part 2: Exodus to Arizonahttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2018/03/10/great-empires-of-north-america-part-2-exodus-to-arizona/
Sat, 10 Mar 2018 17:36:07 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=2768They raised mighty mud-brick cities, and built a trade empire spanning the Southwest. Meet Arizona’s desert lords. The people had been walking in the desert for many days. When they’d departed from northern Mexico on their great northward migration, they’d been more than a hundred strong – men, women and children, well-practiced at surviving in…

The people had been walking in the desert for many days. When they’d departed from northern Mexico on their great northward migration, they’d been more than a hundred strong – men, women and children, well-practiced at surviving in this merciless land.

These people knew how to drink water from cacti, how to trap the mice and lizards that scurried among the rocks, and how to find shady places to sleep through the brutal midday heat.

But this miserable life was very different from the one they’d left behind.

The desert of Arizona

They were exiles – though we have no idea why they were cast out, or from where.

Like all fleeing refugees, they must have carried stories of the paradise they’d left behind: memories of a lost Eden or Atlantis whose name is long-vanished in the mists of prehistory.

Wherever this paradise lay, it must have been a wealthy, well-connected place, because the refugees carried precious valuables from faraway lands – gleaming seashells from the Pacific seacoast; turquoise ingots from the Rocky Mountains; fine wine distilled from saguaro cacti; colorful pet parrots from the tropical South.

Pottery and valuables, similar to the ones the refugees would have carried with them across the desert

Their lost Eden must also have been a fertile land, because they carried seeds; enough to grow vast fields of corn, squash and beans. They were clearly accustomed to a comfortable life in clean, well-furnished houses, because that’s the life they’d soon rebuild in this harsh desert.

Along with these memories, treasures and practical skills, the refugees brought a foreign language, unrelated to any in their new land – as well as new gods, songs, dances and rituals utterly alien to this northern desert.

They were searching for a place to start anew.

After many weeks of walking in the desert’s shimmering heat, the people came to a fast-flowing river, with low banks and sprawling flatlands on both sides. Here, they decided, was a good place to begin their work.

People building the great canal at Snaketown, Arizona

The people worked together to quickly build a small village of dugout houses, protected from the sun with strong roofs of mud and branches. They dug neat latrine pits outside town.

And for the next hundred days, every able-bodied man labored to dig a great canal, which carried torrents of river water out onto the flatlands, where the women planted the seeds they’d carried across the wasteland.

Typical early-period houses in Snaketown, Arizona

There on the riverbanks, they resurrected the culture they remembered – one piece at a time.

In their new riverside village, known today as Snaketown, Arizona, the people carved delicate shell bracelets, crafted intricate turquoise jewelry, sculpted their distinctive red-and-black pottery, and harvested saguaro cactus to make their favorite wine.

Typical houses in Snaketown, Arizona

They kept their village pristinely clean, sweeping their dirt yards diligently, and dumping their waste in pits outside town. They continued to breed their beloved parrots, and to raise pet dogs.

After a few years (around 300 BCE), the village had grown into a small town. The people were no longer miserable refugees. They were thriving in this irrigated landscape they’d created. In fact, some families began to move downstream to start new villages of their own.

Fields and canals in Snaketown, Arizona

As the latrine pits outside town filled up, the people covered them with clay, which baked to rock hardness in the desert sun.

It wasn’t long before these clay mounds began to serve a new purpose. The people flattened off the tops and constructed small shrines atop the platforms. There, at special times of the year, they burned sweet incense in beautifully carved censers, and chanted hymns whose words are long forgotten.

People at Snaketown, Arizona, with a pyramid in the distance

The Arizona desert was becoming a land of pyramids, one garbage dump at a time.

These ritual sites also served a highly practical purpose. Every town’s survival depended on organized irrigation and annual crop cycles – and disputes over water rights could quickly turn deadly. (In fact, the world’s first recorded war was fought over rights to river water, between two Sumerian city-states.)

As in Egypt and Sumer, ancient Arizona’s seasonal religious gatherings brought people from all villages together, to share sacred wine, to compete in inter-city sports – Snaketown had an outdoor ball court the size of a football field – and to dance the dances and sing the songs they all knew by heart.

The great ball court at Snaketown, Arizona

As the newcomers expanded eastward across Arizona, these gatherings served to cement the community’s ritual and emotional bonds, to sustain cultural identity across every town and village, to reward cooperation and sharing – in short, to unite the people as a full-fledged regional civilization.

Like every expanding civilization, these people would soon bump up against other great powers.

By 700 CE, the people’s civilization had spread throughout the Salt and Gila river basins, spanning most of Central Arizona. To the southeast, the pyramid-builders encountered a group known today as the Salado culture – also an established nation of farmers, who eagerly swapped ideas and techniques with their western neighbors.

The small village founded on the shores of the river

From their Salado allies, Snaketown’s people learned to build bigger mud-brick houses, temples, and walls; and to cultivate new crops, including amaranth and cotton. The Salado, in turn, learned better irrigation techniques, along with new tricks for achieving bigger crop yields.

Trade brought wealth – and the pyramid-builders entered a great golden age.

In Snaketown, clay pyramids were raised to new heights; their elevated shrines replaced with towering mud-brick temple complexes, not unlike the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia.

Like Sumerian temples, these complexes likely served as storage and distribution points for grain and other crops – which tightened the temples’ control over all areas of life.

People working the fields of crops in Snaketown, with a pyramid in the distance

By 1000 CE, the people were constructing great clay platforms in the desert, equidistant between the largest cities , to serve as dedicated gathering points for seasonal rituals. The temples atop these platforms served as homes for a priestly class who assembled vast hoards of jewelry and other luxury goods.

In the cities, the builders raised enormous mud-brick palaces, fortified with thick clay walls. It’s not entirely clear who lived in these compounds – perhaps priestly families, or wealthy merchants, or war-leaders – but whoever these patricians were, they obviously lived a privileged life, secluded from the common people on the streets.

The remains of the house known today as “Casa Grande,” in Coolidge, Arizona

At its peak, Snaketown bore more than a passing resemblance to Sumerian cities like Uruk and Ur.

Strolling along one of the city’s clean-swept avenues, you’d have heard the calling of merchants, hawking fine shell bracelets and brightly colored woven garments. Amid the honeycomb of mud-brick houses, dogs barked and parrots squawked, accompanies by the squeals of children and the singing of entertainers.

The great city of Snaketown, Arizona

In the market, you might catch a glimpse of Salado traders, bartering in their strange tongue. Merchants from lands far to the south would call out, beckoning you to examine their finely painted pottery. You might even pass a caravan newly arrived from faraway California, unloading sacks of turquoise and mother-of-pearl.

Gazing upward, you’d see the towering mud-brick temples in the distance, and perhaps catch a faint whiff of earthy incense. Beyond, the clay walls of manor-houses cast shadows across the street. If you looked carefully, you might catch a glimpse of the city’s elite reclining atop their flat roofs, sipping wine beneath woven sunshades.

A bustling marketplace in Snaketown, circa 1000 CE

But of course, this cultural flowering could not last forever.

By 1150 CE, the people had been dwelling in Arizona’s river valleys for more than a thousand years – their ancient refugee status no more than a distant memory. They were the undisputed lords of this place now; wealthy beyond dreams; drawing water from canals so ancient that they’d become part of the landscape, like earth and stone.

What tales did they tell about their long-lost homeland? We do not know, because the people did not write. Like all great civilizations, they must have believed they carried a divine pedigree; a holy mandate from the gods themselves, to rule this land and preserve the ancient ways.

Priests and wealthy people of Snaketown

But the ancient ways were failing. The population had grown beyond the land’s ability to sustain them, and people began to starve. For years, the streets must have echoed with the sounds of riot and despair, as people pleaded with the temple to distribute grain it did not have.

The climate struck an even harsher blow around 1275 CE. A drought swept the land – and all across Arizona, sprawling fields of crops shriveled and died.

About two generations later, around 1325 CE, the climate turned warmer, melting mountaintop snow that drowned the low-lying river valleys in torrents of floodwater.

Flash floods are still common in the Arizona desert today.

Surely, the people must have believed the apocalypse was upon them.

Many would have hurried to the temples to make desperate prayers and sacrifices – while mad prophets roamed the streets, howling messages of doom, pleading with the wealthy and powerful to repent of their sins. The aristocrats retreated into their enclaves, fortifying their temples and palaces against their own people.

The people of Snaketown rioting in the streets, circa 1325 CE

By the mid-1300s CE, the great cities had fallen into anarchy, and the common people fled to the desert, to live the same life their refugee ancestors had endured, more than 1,500 years earlier – to drink water from cacti, to trap mice and lizards for food, and to hide from the merciless sun.

This is a story as old as time itself – a pattern that played out among the Amazigh and the Kushites; among Sumerians and Sasanians and dozens of other empires whose greatest successes (like those of tragic Greek heroes) contained the seeds of their ultimate downfalls.

As strange as it may seem to us today, when ancient cities could no longer sustain their people, the people simply… left.

Ruins of a mud-brick city in Sycamore Canyon, Arizona

By 1450, all of Arizona’s great ancient cities had been abandoned.

Out in the desert, no one had the time or resources to craft fine jewelry, to raise exotic birds, or to trade with merchants from distant lands. The great pyramids and temples crumbled slowly to dust.

As decades passed, some of the people’s descendants began to move back into the ruins. These people called themselves the Akimel O’odham – and like Europeans of the early Middle Ages, they lived in the shadows of ancient colossi whose names were long-forgotten.

Ruins at Casa Granda, Arizona

When the Spanish arrived in Arizona in the 1500s, they found only windswept vestiges of these ancient cities; collapsing mud-brick houses and crumbling walls in the parched desert. Unable to believe that the O’odham had built these structures, they demanded to know what the ruins were.

“They’re hu-hu-kem,” said the local people: “all used up.”

O’odham people (“Pima Indians”) perform a ceremony in the Arizona desert

“Hohokam” was the name the Spanish recorded from that conversation, and – pathetic as it may be – that’s the name still used to describe these great builders, whose own name for their civilization is forever lost to us.

Against all odds, several groups of O’odham people are still thriving today, living throughout Central and Southern Arizona, speaking a language directly related to that of their city-dwelling ancestors.

Aside from that language, and a few carefully preserved songs and dances, the O’odham remember only faint fragments of their ancestors’ urban life. Even now, ancient Hohokam civilization is still very poorly understood – especially in comparison with other river-centric civilizations like Sumer and Egypt.

A child of the modern Totono O’odham performs in a traditional dance competition in Arizona

Archaeologists have slim evidence to go on when it comes to reconstructing the pantheon of Hohokam gods, or the rituals they performed at their temples, or the banquets thrown at their manor-houses – or any area of their life that isn’t directly attested by hard material evidence.

Perhaps most tantalizingly of all, we still don’t know where they came from.

In the absence of clear contextual evidence, the Hohokam people seem – like the Sumerians – to appear out of the blue; a full-fledged agricultural society that almost instantly transformed their landscape, raised mighty cities from the mud, and culturally captivated every society they encountered.

O’odham people perform a traditional dance in Arizona

But unlike the Sumerians, the Hohokam people were not treasured by the new empires who conquered their lands. Over the next few centuries, Arizona was invaded by wave after wave of alien peoples – the Europeans – who scarcely acknowledged the existence of their mighty predecessors. The land has been ruled by invaders ever since.

What new civilizations might have risen in the river valleys of Arizona, if European hordes hadn’t swept over the land? How might those successor states have enshrined the legacy of their predecessors? We’ll never know.

But to this day, O’odham people still nod respectfully when they pass by the ruined cities of their ancestors.

]]>2768Great Empires of North America, Part 1: The Old Worldhttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2018/02/27/great-empires-north-america-part-1-welcome-old-world/
Tue, 27 Feb 2018 21:45:49 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=2688They built astronomical observatories and innovative farming systems — and we don’t even know their names. Meet North America’s first great civilizations. Nearly four thousand years ago — as the city of Babylon was first growing into a metropolis, and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom was in full swing — a group of hunters along North America’s…

]]>They built astronomical observatories and innovative farming systems — and we don’t even know their names. Meet North America’s first great civilizations.

Nearly four thousand years ago — as the city of Babylon was first growing into a metropolis, and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom was in full swing — a group of hunters along North America’s Mississippi River assembled in their thousands, to build something very strange.

In a place that would someday be known as northern Louisiana, they staked out an area of some five hundred acres, and began to heap the earth into enormous mounds.The great astronomical observatory constructed by people of the Poverty Point culture.

By the time their great project was completed, these people had arranged more than one million cubic feet of soil into a sprawling system of concentric semicircles, ten feet high and nearly a square mile in diameter. At the far western end of these earthworks, they raised a towering mountain of earth.

Standing on that mountains’s peak, gazing eastward across the construction, one would see the sun rise precisely above its center on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

But this vast, intricate structure did not serve as the center of a city, like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia.

It wasn’t a king’s tomb, like the pyramids of Egypt. The people who built these earthworks did not surround them with fields of crops, or pens of livestock, or imposing royal palaces, as did the builders of so many other holy monuments.

People at Poverty Point, circa 1700 BCE.

Instead, they stockpiled vast hoards of copper, slate, quartz and other exotic materials – often imported from hundreds of miles away. They used these materials to manufacture finely tooled knives, beads, stone effigies and animal figurines, which they sold to a network of trading partners throughout North America’s Gulf Coast region.

Their business flourished for more than a thousand years – until at last, around 700 BCE, they abandoned their great distribution center, never to return.

Stone effigies sculpted by people of the Poverty Point culture.

We don’t know what the builders of these earthworks called themselves – or even what language they spoke. We have no idea which (if any) living American Indian groups they might be related to, because we’ve found none of their depictions of themselves, or any remnants of their DNA. Today, they’re known as the Poverty Point culture, after the modern English name for the place where they once made their home.

The Poverty Point people were not the first great civilization to rise in North America.

As early as 3500 BCE — centuries before Stonehenge or Egypt’s Great Pyramid were built — people in what’s now Watson Brake, Louisiana raised a set of circular mounds 900 feet across, towering 25 feet high.

These earthworks seem to have served as a base for hunter-gatherers – meaning that even without agriculture, these builders (whoever they were) knew how to organize human expertise on a large scale, over an extended period.

To create, in other words, a civilized society.

The enigmatic earthworks at Watson Brake, constructed around 3500 BCE.

But long before anyone raised earthworks in North America, technological and societal innovation had already been flourishing for a very long time.

In the first article of my “Great African Empires” series, we met the San people, whose technology may date back as far as 44,000 BCE, and whose languages may be directly related to the primordial mother tongue spoken by the first Homo sapiens.

We also met the Australian Yidindji people, whose oral traditions clearly describe a sea level rise that happened at the end of the last Ice Age, no less than 13,000 years ago.

Sometime during that last Ice Age, people first started walking from Russia to Alaska.

Starting around 30,000 years ago, the eastern tip of Siberia was connected to western Alaska by a land bridge known as Beringia. This bridge was no narrow strip of ice, but a sprawling tundra, teeming with mammoths and woolly rhinos.

Megafauna of Beringia

Around 13,000 BCE, a few thousand people crossed Beringia into Alaska – most likely pursuing herds of the great beasts they hunted.

These Ice-Age hunters could not have known, of course, that they were entering a brand-new continent.

The landscape in Alaska would have looked much the same as that of Russia and Beringia: a half-frozen steppe-tundra, bounded by towering glaciers, filled with forests of pine and birch, and with the same thundering menagerie of furred, tusked, horned beasts depicted in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet.

A family of hunters stop to set up camp on their way across Beringia.

In fact, the culture of these North American newcomers would remain strikingly similar to that of their relatives in Siberia.

But as the ice melted and the newcomers multiplied, their descendants began to push southward, lured by warmer weather, greener meadows, and greater herds of mammoth, mastodon — and of course, by the bison, which thronged in their millions across the North American plains.

By 12,000 BCE, these hunters had settled throughout what’s now the west coast of Canada.

Nomadic people in modern Siberia, next to a house they call a “chum.”

Their most distinctive mark was the pair of fluted incisions they made on the sides of their stone arrowheads. We still don’t know why these peoples fluted their arrowheads – this technique is unique to North America; stone-age hunters around the world got along perfectly fine without it — or whether they were even a single culture, or a diverse array of peoples who happened to share certain ideas.

We call these mysterious people the Clovis culture — though we have no idea how they categorized themselves.

Arrowheads of the Clovis culture, with distinctive fluting along the sides.

But the Clovis people were not alone on their new continent.

As early as 17,000 BCE — a full 4,000 years before the Clovis people arrived in Canada — people at Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rockshelter were stockpiling corn, squash and fruit, hunting deer and small game, and creating arrowheads without the distinctive Clovis fluting.

We simply don’t know. Some experts think they came across Beringia much earlier, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the Clovis people. Others have connected them with even more ancient sites — such as Monte Verde in Chile, where people constructed hide buildings and clay-lined pits as early as 20,000 BCE.

In any case, one fact is very clear:

By 13,000 BCE, North America was already populated by a diverse cast of well-developed cultures.

By 9000 BCE, people in the Great Basin — the sprawling watershed region at the center of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California — had become experts at hunting ducks and rabbits, harvesting roots and pine nuts, and carving scenes of animals into the rocks.

Farmers in the Lower Pecos region of Texas, around 6000 BCE.

A few thousand years later, in 6000 BCE, people in the Lower Pecos region of Texas were practicing organized agriculture and creating complex cave paintings. By 5500 BCE, people in what’s now Florida had settled down to a fishing life not unlike that of the earliest Sumerians.

Although ancient North America didn’t experience a bronze or iron age, it gave birth to a staggering array of complex societies.

When Babylon rose to power far to the east, North America was home to a dizzying range of civilizations, about which we know astonishingly little. Some of these peoples hunted bison on the Great Plains, while others fished in the southern marshes, or grew crops on hilltop farms — living in dread, no doubt, of raids from the wild nomads of the steppes.

Ancient people fishing off the California coast

But since none of these peoples felt inclined to leave inscriptions or compile written texts, we do not know their names, or the names of their cities, or of the gods in their pantheons.

We know exactly what they liked to eat, because they left plenty of it lying around — but we can make only vague guesses about what they believed and how they worshiped, based on scant clues from their effigies, paintings, carvings and sculptures.

We know they must have spoken thousands of dialects of hundreds of languages, in dozens of different language families. Among some of those language families, only one lonely language remains alive — as in the case of Zuni; while other families, like the Uto-Aztecan languages, still have several living members, along with many extinct ones.

People of ancient Wickliffe, Kentucky.

There are, without a doubt, entire families of extinct North American languages about which we know nothing.

Throughout those centuries, the North American continent played host to legendary cities, epic migrations, mighty kings, transformative religions, and a myriad of intertwined, ever-evolving ways of life — some of which you’ll experience later in this series, while others still remain buried beneath the dust of prehistory.

Europeans did not invade an untouched paradise. They invaded a continent already dense with thousands of years of civilization.

People in the city of Cahokia, in medieval Illinois.

Over the course of this series, we’re going to see how the great civilizations of ancient North America developed a breathtaking variety of societal structures and ways of life. We’ll visit the mighty cities those civilizations raised in ancient New Mexico and New York, and in medieval Illinois.

We’ll meet powerful merchant princes who built a trade empire across the Northeast, and steppe warriors who defeated and enslaved their would-be European conquerors.

]]>2688Great Empires of Central Asia, Part 5: The Eastern Renaissancehttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/12/09/great-empires-central-asia-part-5-eastern-renaissance/
Sat, 09 Dec 2017 12:23:06 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1610Their realm was the heart of civilization — until the apocalypse came. Meet the great masters of Central Asia’s last golden age. When you think of “Arabian culture,” what do you imagine? Towering citadels, perhaps; adorned with domes and minarets. Flowing robes of many colors, and turbans and embroidered veils. Gardens of colorful flowers and…

]]>Their realm was the heart of civilization — until the apocalypse came. Meet the great masters of Central Asia’s last golden age.

When you think of “Arabian culture,” what do you imagine? Towering citadels, perhaps; adorned with domes and minarets. Flowing robes of many colors, and turbans and embroidered veils. Gardens of colorful flowers and birds, where courtesans sing poetry for sultans. Spices and the scent of sandalwood, and the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.

It might surprise you, then, to learn that none of this comes from Arabia. Not at all.

When the armies of Muhammad rode eastward in the 620s CE, they brought none of these things with them.

A modern Arabian Bedouin man and his camels.

In those days, Arabia’s battle-hardened zealots knew only the stern, fierce world of the desert — that trackless expanse of sand and sky, where warriors wrote love-poems to their swords, and sang of riding camel-back across the sun-parched wastes to raid for honor and glory.

To be sure, the city of Medina was a trade hub in those days (as Mecca itself may have been). The Prophet and his followers — many wealthy merchant families among them — would have tasted Indian saffron; heard Persian poetry; caught thin strains and melodies of the vast cultural symphony that thundered in Central Asia, far to the east.

But for Muhammad’s armies, Persia was still an alien world — a mysterious realm whose mountains and forests might harbor all manner of fabulous beasts and enchanted treasures.

The ruins of Rudkhan castle, in modern Iran.

So it was only natural — the will of God, some might say — that Arabia’s fighters should ride for the East.

The armies of this new faith would be far from the first to yearn for Persia — nor the first to be captured by the very world they set out to conquer. For more than 2,800 years, the forests, mountains, lakes and plains of Uzbekistan, Iran and Afghanistan had beguiled Babylonian kings, Greek emperors, and horde upon horde of horse-riders from the Eurasian steppe.

A Persian court, as depicted in a 16th-century miniature painting attributed to the artist Jami.

And the more Asia churned, the more marvelous this region’s culture grew. Each new wave of conquerors you’ve met in this series — from the Scythians and Sogdians to the Parthians and Sasanians — birthed and fostered new ideas from all across the continent: Greek architecture, Babylonian mathematics, Chinese painting, the art of steppe warfare.

From this rich soil, one of the most extraordinary cultural flowerings in all human history was about to emerge.

But that flower’s birth would be a violent one.

Deep in the Elburz Mountains, the armies of Islam clashed with proud Persian families who had no intention of giving up their ancestral homes. These families’ roots reached back into the furthest mists of recorded history, and their one God was Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Fire.

Darya Sar, in the Elburz Mountains of modern Iran.

Even when Islam finally made its way into those hidden enclaves, it was not the Islam of the Sunni Caliphate in Damascus and Baghdad. Instead, the new faith came with the Shi’a movement, whose leaders had fled the Caliphate’s persecution to seek sanctuary in the secluded hills and groves of Persia.

Whereas Christians in Europe would massacre one another over points of theology, warfare within Islam was always more openly realpolitik. The Shi’a believed (as they believe today) that Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib should have been the first caliph, and all who preceded him were usurpers.

Many theological differences hinge on that legal point; no doubt about that.

But still, no one in 9th-century Persia was warring over whether or not Muhammad was God’s Prophet. Indigenous populations of Jews and Christians had been incorporated under Islamic rule, and obediently paid the “non-Muslim tax” (jizya) to their rulers. The question now was, who was going to rule the eastern reaches of the House of Islam: the Sunni Caliphate in Baghdad, or one of the Shi’a dynasties of Persia?

Two Persian knights clash.

The first plan was a compromise. The Commander of the Faithful (amīr al-mu’minīn) appointed a governor who’d grown up in Persia, but had still spent enough time in Baghdad that he could be trusted to toe the party line. That man was a general named Tahir ibn al-Husayn — and while he did indeed pay lip service to the Caliphate, he promptly set up his own Tahirid dynasty, and ruled Khorasan (eastern Iran and northwestern Afghanistan) as a semi-autonomous kingdom.

The army of the sultan Mahmud attacks the fortress of Zarang.

Even that fragile peace was soon to shatter. Less than 40 years later (in the 860s CE), a Persian bandit named Ya’qub ibn Layth al-Saffar assembled his own private army, seized control of the city of Sistan, and swept through Central Asia like a scythe. He unseated the Tahirids from their citadels of Merv and Nishapur, declared an independent Saffarid state in Khorasan, and nearly managed to lay siege to Baghdad itself before his army was finally turned back.

All of a sudden, the once-invincible House of Islam was ripping in two.

And although the Saffarid state scarcely outlasted its founder, the wound it had inflicted was slow to heal. For the next two centuries, a fast-burning succession of Persian dynasties — the Sajids, the Samanids, the Buyids, and the Sallarids — waged relentless war across the fertile plains and valleys of Khorasan.

Warriors of the Iranian Intermezzo period.

Some of these dynasties were Shi’a, while others sought to rebuild ties with the Sunni Caliphate. But from the 800s onward, Central Asian Islam was clearly striking out on its own unique path.

In some ways, this Iranian Intermezzo (821-1055) mirrors the violent birth pangs of the European Middle Ages, far to the west. At the same time the Saffarids and Tahirids were battling it out in Persia, the kings of the Carolingian dynasty were welding the Frankish kingdoms into Europe’s first sizable state since the fall of the Roman Empire.

And as Charlemagne and his successors re-cast classical Greece and Rome in a Christian mold, the princes of the Iranian Intermezzo drew on the equally venerable traditions of their Achaemenid and Sasanian ancestors.

“The Poet Ferdowsi at the Court of Ghazni,” by the painter Agha Mirek (1532).

Iranian scholars adapted the Arabic script (abjad) to write the Persian language. Bards composed poetry in classical Persian style, spiced with new Arabic vocabulary. Architects constructed Islamic schools (madrasas) and mosques far more ornate than any in Damascus. And from their minarets, the call to prayer was not shouted, as in Arabia — but sung, like an enchanting love song to the Lord.

Persia was re-forging Islam in its own image.

And just as medieval Europe’s rediscovery of Greco-Roman arts and sciences would at last give rise to the Renaissance, the many branches of Persia’s classical traditions were beginning to blossom with vibrant new fruit. Central Asia was reborn into a more glorious, illustrious age than any before it.

Sultan Mahmud holds court in the city of Ghazni.

The oasis city of Bukhara, in what’s now Uzbekistan, lay at the heart of this Eastern Renaissance. That city had already served as a Silk Road trading hub for more than 1,200 years, and had been a crown jewel of the Sasanian and Sogdian dynasties; a melting pot of Persian aristocrats, Indian mathematicians, Chinese merchants, Arabian scholars and Turkish mercenaries.

Under the Samanid dynasty, Bukhara rose to rival Baghdad itself as Islam’s cultural capital. For more than 200 years, from the 800s to the 1000s CE –

Bukhara was one of the most scientifically and artistically advanced cities on earth.

The city of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan.

One traveler, the historian Abu Mansur Abdu l-Malik ath-Thaalibi, described that city as:

The focus of splendor, the shrine of empire, the meeting-place of the most unique intellects of the age, the horizon of the literary stars of the world.

Like the Medici in Renaissance Florence, the Samanid amirs lavished mountains of gold on scholarship and art, turning Bukhara into a paradise for creative work.

They commissioned towering mosques and luxuriant public gardens, and filled their universities with leading astronomers, historians, philosophers, physicians and mathematicians – including Al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra (whose name is the root of the word “algorithm”), and the chemist Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, who discovered and named alcohol (from the Arabic al-kuḥl).

Islamic astronomers take measurements on their sextants and astrolabes.

But the Samanids’ most far-reaching decision of all was to reject Shi’a Islam, and align themselves with the Sunni Caliphate in Baghdad. By joining with the western Caliphate, the Samanids opened up trade and travel routes stretching all the way from southern Spain and Morocco, through Egypt and Turkey, across Arabia, Jordan and Syria, all the way to Iran and Afghanistan.

While this united House of Islam was not an empire per se –

It opened the floodgates on a cross-continental flow of ideas, goods and peoples.

The House of Islam (Dar al-Islam in the 800s-1000s.

For the first time in world history, an Islamic scholar born in Córdoba, Spain could safely travel to study philosophy in Cairo, spend time composing literature in Baghdad, make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and live out his old age in Bukhara – all without (necessarily) having to learn any language other than Arabic, and without any worry that he might fail to be greeted by friendly communities of fellow-believers in each new city he visited.

Persian travelers during the Golden Age of Islam.

The challenge of protecting all this cultural wealth fell to Islam’s latest converts: the Turks. These horse-warriors from the steppe (who, remember, had also served as muscle for the Sogdian merchant princes you met in Part 4 of this series) took to their new religion with relish. Turkic slave-soldiers (mamluks) could soon be found in cities and frontier posts from Egypt to Afghanistan, standing “row upon row,” just waiting for the word to leap upon enemies of the faith.

But of course, the Turks weren’t particularly thrilled about serving as slave-soldiers to Persian amirs.

Turkic mamluk cavalry.

In 962, a Turkic slave commander named Alp-Tegin decided he’d had enough of following Samanid orders. When the amir of Bukhara died, the royal family fell into chaos as they battled for succession of the throne – and Alp-Tegin seized his chance. He gathered an army of Turkish slave-soldiers, crossed the Hindu Kush mountains, captured the city of Ghazna, in what’s now Afghanistan, and declared himself the founder and amir of the new Ghaznavid dynasty.

But just as Persia had captured the Greeks and Arabs, its culture captured the Turks, too. Although the Ghaznavid ruling family were ethnically Turkic, they patronized Persian art, literature and science, and built their capital of Ghazna into a metropolis of Persian culture. In fact, the Ghaznavid era took the Samanids’ achievements even further.

Throughout the 1000s CE (as William the Conqueror and his knights were invading Saxon England), Ghaznavid rulers commissioned poems, books, plays and treatises that are still read widely in Iran today – including the Shahnameh(“Book of Kings”), Persia’s national epic, which rivals the Odyssey and Arthurian legend in scale and imagination.

The Ghaznavids bankrolled hundreds of scholars – including Al-Biruni, a polymath credited as one of the inventors of the scientific method. And just like princes of the European Renaissance, Ghaznavid amirs were fascinated by experiments in astrology, alchemy and esoteric philosophy.

Persian chemists study the art of distillation.

The Iranian Renaissance produced two poets still ranked among the world’s all-time greats, in any language.

First of these was Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), who could well be described as Persia’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci. Khayyam conceived new geometric solutions for cubic equations, developed a solar calendar so accurate that it was used in Iran until 1911, and composed the now-famous collection of poetry now known as the Rubaiyat.

Omar Khayyam, as depicted in a statue in modern Iran.

Or at least, this collection is attributed to him; its actual provenance is fiercely contested to this day. In any case, the Rubaiyat is a masterpiece of esoteric Sufi imagery:

Awake! for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the Stone that puts the stars to flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

With the poet Rumi, on the other hand, we find ourselves somewhat firmer ground. He was born in 1207, in the city of Balkh (or possibly Wakhsh), in what’s now Afghanistan. In those days, the area was ruled by the Khwarezmids, another dynasty of former Turkic slave-soldiers, who’d broken loose from the Ghaznavids and carved out their own state in the 1000s.

Rumi’s childhood was fated to be a tragic one.

A Persian man and his child (looking, perhaps, a bit like Rumi and his father) visit the tomb of Shah Mahmud in Ghazni.

Just as the thriving Silk-Road empires of the Sogdian era could never have predicted the coming of Islam, nobody in the Islamic Golden Age expected the Mongols. Like the Scythians and Huns before them, these horse-archers erupted from the mysterious black hole of the Eurasian steppe, decimating every army they met.

The Mongol army lays siege to a Russian city.

By the early 1200s, it looked as if the Mongols might be willing to consolidate their gains in Tibet and western China, and settle down to trade with the rest of the civilized world. It was precisely that intention, it seems, that inspired Genghis Khan himself to send a trade caravan to Khorasan, with a message of peace for the Khwarezmid shah. But to the shah’s ears, the Khan’s tone came off as a bit too flippant:

“I am master of the lands of the rising sun while you rule those of the setting sun. Let us conclude a firm treaty of friendship and peace.”

The shah, who believed himself to be God’s literal representative on Earth, resented the implication that the Mongols intended to remain free of the House of Islam. And perhaps he genuinely had no idea about the diplomatic incident at the town of Otrar, where the local governor (a man named Inalchuq) captured and imprisoned the Mongol messengers.

The poet Ferdowsi Reads the Shahnameh to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.

In any case, Genghis Khan was willing to let that incident slide. He sent a second caravan west to Khorasan, this time asking for an explanation of the unfortunate event. At that meeting, the shah himself ordered the ambassadors’ hair shaved off (a grave insult for a Mongol warrior), beheaded one of them, and sent the others back to Genghis with no other reply.

What else could a Khan do, but deliver battle?

Genghis began by deploying his highly trained network of professional spies, who soon brought back intriguing intelligence: the Kingdom of Khwarezm was far from unified. Many of the local Persians (the poet Rumi’s family included) despised the dynasty’s ruling Turkic family, and yearned to be freed from their yoke.

And so, in the year 1219, Genghis Khan crossed the Tian Shan mountains with 300,000 horse-archers, and laid siege to the citadels of Persia.

Mongol cavalry prepare to attack.

Mongol siege engineers, fresh off a campaign against the exquisitely fortified cities of Imperial China, shattered the mud-brick walls of Samarkand and Bukhara. As a dedicated Mongol strike force pursued the shah himself into the wilderness of northwestern Iran, the Khan’s armies smashed the Persian cities’ aqueducts, burned their libraries, raped their women, slaughtered their men, and sent thousands of refugees fleeing westward.

Among those refugees were the poet Rumi and his family.

Many of them fled to the great metropolis of Baghdad — which the Mongols crushed in 1258; catapulting full-sized trees into its mosques, beheading world-famous artists and scientists, and destroying the entire contents of the House of Wisdom; the greatest library in the world at that time, which contained more books than Alexandria, including works by Archimedes, Euclid and Ptolemy that are now lost to us forever.

Mongols lay siege to the city of Baghdad.

Rumi and his family, for their part, had the foresight to flee all the way to the city of Konya, in what’s now Turkey. Along the way, they stopped off in the Persian city of Nishapur, where eighteen-year-old Rumi formed a friendship that would transform his entire worldview. The famous poet Attar, a devoutly mystical Sufi, taught the young poet to contemplate a more esoteric vision of the relationship between God and the Self.

As Rumi and his fellow refugees watched their entire world burn around them, the poet looked inward, finding consolation in the transcendent. He penned hundreds of elegant verses, of which these lines are only a small taste:

Why should I seek? I am the same as
He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!

Rumi in contemplation, as depicted in a modern painting.

At the climax of Persia’s golden age, its poets and philosophers had reached an apex that would not be equaled in the West for centuries. And yet, when we compare the Iranian Renaissance with its European counterpart, one clear difference shines out: unlike in Europe, Central Asia’s Renaissance did not give rise to a Scientific Enlightenment, an Age of Exploration, or an Industrial Revolution.

Instead, Persia’s most brilliant intellectual flowering was cut off at the stem.

Mongol armies not only burned libraries and slaughtered scholars, but shattered aqueducts and filled in wells, devastating the delicate ecology of a region that had been painstakingly cultivated for thousands of years. As Bukhara, Samarkand, Ghazni and Baghdad were smashed to rubble, their flourishing gardens, orchards and crop-fields were reduced to barren desert — almost overnight.

The city of Ghazni, Uzbekistan today.

And this is why, if you were to visit Iraq or Afghanistan today, you would step on the parched soil of a world almost unrecognizable to its 13th-century inhabitants. Where grass and palm-groves once sprawled, only hard clay remains. Where rivers and canals once ran, dirt tracks run through sand. The Middle East and Central Asia have never been so desolate, in all recorded history — not since the primordial farmers of Sumer and Elam first dug water-channels from the clay.

For all that, the Mongols didn’t quite manage to bring about the end of the world.

In some ways, they actually advanced Asia’s cultural and technological development, linking the Middle East directly with China for the first time in world history; introducing European astronomy to China, the printing press to Turkey (and thereby to Europe), and safety and stability to the entire continent — for a while, at least.

But after less than 200 years of Pax Mongolica, Genghis Khan’s horseback empire was fragmenting, torn between rival factions that each claimed vast swathes of Asia as their own. One branch took over China and became the Yuan dynasty. Another branch settled in Russia as the Golden Horde, while the Chagatai Khanate settled in Uzbekistan, and the Il-Khanid branch took over the Middle East, basing itself in the conquered city of Baghdad.

The Mongol Khanates’ division of Asia in 1259.

And for the next 600 years — right up until the modern era — Asia and the Middle East would remain fragmented along (roughly) the lines the Mongols drew. As the Ottoman sultans rose in Turkey, and the Russian Empire swept eastward across northern Asia, the territories of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan would drift further and further apart in language, culture, government and political alignment — and deeper into poverty.

While all of Central Asia remains (primarily) Islamic, and the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand are still inhabited today, the days when a scholar could travel freely from Egypt to Persia are long-gone — and may never return within our lifetimes. And although some Central Asian countries (most notably Iran) have caught up with the industrialized West in many areas, we’ll never know what might have happened, had the Mongols never come.

“They Are Triumphant” by Vasily Vereshchagin (1874).

Central Asia is a world interrupted.

Just as the coming of Islam disrupted the Silk-Road golden age of the Sogdians, the scourge of the Mongols permanently transformed Central Asia — in ecology, population, economics, and almost every other area of life.

Would 15th-century Persians have invented steam engines and microscopes, had it not been for the Mongols? Maybe not. But at the very least, their land would have remained fertile, capable of supporting large populations of skilled specialists. Their scholars would certainly have kept creating great works of poetry, music, astronomy, medicine and mathematics, drawing on vast libraries of carefully indexed information.

Who can say what they might have discovered, had things gone differently?

Scholars at an Abbasid library, from the Maqamat of al-Hariri by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, Baghdad (1237).

This brings us back to the theme that’s run through this whole series.

Gazing at the arid ruins of Bukhara and Samarkand, or the abandoned hillside palaces of Panjikent, or the vast wildernesses of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, one might be forgiven for wondering whether any cities raised in such desolate places could ever have been more than mere temporary flukes; experiments in urban living that inevitably collapsed, scattering their inhabitants back across the wastes, to return to nomadic life.

But in fact, it is THIS Central Asia that’s the historical anomaly.

For more than 3,500 years — from the 2300s BCE all the way to the 1200s CE — these mountains, valleys and plains nourished towering forests, lush orchards and fertile grain-fields, feeding the primordial citadels of the BMAC culture, the trading states of the Scythians, the bustling entrepôts of the Sogdians, and the great university cities of the Persian Renaissance.

A cemetery in modern Khwarezm, Uzbekistan (photo by Don Croner).

Only in the last 600 years has this region become barren desert. It attracts outsiders now for different reasons — not for trade and scholarly debate, but for the rivers of petroleum that flow beneath its mountains.

And ever since the Mongols shattered the House of Islam, its states have been reduced to geopolitical pawns. Today, Asia’s fallen giants are bartered and plundered at the whims of new kingdoms, based not in Asia’s heart — as was the case throughout most of history — but around its fringes, and across far-off seas.

If the idea of Uzbekistan as the center of the world strikes us as bizarre today, this is only because our society is itself a strange prodigy; an unexpected cultural flowering from Western Europe, of all places, which has engulfed the world over the last few centuries — little more than the lifespan of a single Persian dynasty.

I hope, with all my heart, that our civilization’s golden age will endure for centuries to come. But it’s sobering to remember that in 13th-century Bukhara and Samarkand —

Scholars must have felt just the same — in the last moments before the apocalypse.

A lone minaret stands in what was once the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan.

]]>1610Great Empires of Central Asia, Part 4: Lords of the Silk Roadhttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/11/11/great-empires-central-asia-part-4-lords-silk-road/
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 21:21:10 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=2206They brought together the best of Asia—then improved on it. Meet the merchant princes of the ancient East. In the year 36 BCE, a Han Chinese expedition marched west across the Jaxartes River, in what’s now Kazakhstan — more than 4,000 miles west of their home in China, in the heart of the mountainous wilderness…

]]>They brought together the best of Asia—then improved on it. Meet the merchant princes of the ancient East.

In the year 36 BCE, a Han Chinese expedition marched west across the Jaxartes River, in what’s now Kazakhstan — more than 4,000 miles west of their home in China, in the heart of the mountainous wilderness of Central Asia.

There on the forested riverbank, the Han horsemen and crossbowmen encountered a force of strange barbarians —

Warriors in heavy iron armor, who fought with long spears and tall shields.

Chinese crossbows and arrows made quick work of these newcomers’ flimsy shields, and soon the spear-fighters were falling in droves. They died quickly, without making it anywhere near the Chinese line.

Han Chinese cavalry and crossbowmen in battle.

When at last the battle was over, and the Han soldiers forded the river to examine the bodies of the dead, they marveled at these unusual barbarians — nothing like the Turkic and Mongolic nomads they were used to fighting on the northern steppe.

Not Persian, either, to judge by their pale skin and strange red cloaks. Who could these men be? Where had they come from?

What had brought them to this desolate place, to meet China’s army in battle?

The answers to those questions remain uncertain to this day. But it’s possible that these spear-fighters may have been a lost legion of a Roman army raised by the general Marcus Licinius Crassus, which was sent eastward to wage war against Persia’s Parthian Empire.

Is it really possible that those Roman legionaries ended up 6,000 miles from home, fighting a Chinese army in Kazakhstan — for a Persian emperor?

The Roman army besieges the walls of a Persian palace.

Here are the known facts: the Parthians soundly defeated the Romans in that war — slaughtered many of their legions, sent others straggling home in despair — and captured at least one legion, whose fate remains unverified.

But whether this story is true or not, the fact that a Roman legion in Kazakhstan is even historically plausible makes one key fact very clear —

By the 1st century BCE, the whole Eurasian landmass had become a deeply interconnected place.

Parthian generals (like those of many iron-age empires) had a well-known habit of sending captured foreign troops to defend the empire’s wild frontiers, where regular soldiers and aristocratic knights preferred not to spend much of their time.

And one of the wildest frontiers of all — the “Alaska” or “Siberia” of the Parthian Empire, if you will — was a province known as Sogdiana. It covered an area that’s still frequently described as a backwater to this day:

Like today, those sprawling mountains, forests and steppe-lands served as a vast buffer zone between the Middle East and China; a geopolitical boxing ring where the great empires fought their proxy wars via third-party armies.

It would’ve been an ideal place to send a captured enemy legion, if you wanted to dispose of them somewhat usefully.

Because, of course, Sogdiana was far from empty.

Since time immemorial, it had been home to nomadic herders, warriors, raiders and traders — most notably the mighty Scythians, whom you met in Part 3 of this series.

But by the 1st century BCE, when that lost Roman legion (may have) marched eastward to die under Chinese arrows, the Scythians were on the steep decline. By then—

A new civilization was rising in former Scythian territory.

A different people were pushing the Scythians out of the fertile river valleys, up onto the northern steppes of what’s now Russia, to herd and raid as their distant ancestors had done.

These new people were, like the Scythians, a loose confederation of Indo-Iranian horse-archers. In fact, their name for themselves came from the Indo-European root skud-, “to shoot.”

A Sogdian archer, from a fresco in Panjikent.

They were the Sugda — the Archers.

But we know them today by the name the ancient Greeks called them: the Sogdians.

Way back in the last days of the Assyrian Empire of Mesopotamia (the 600s BCE), the Sogdians seem to have been indistinguishable from their Scythian kinfolk. Assyrian records describe raids from horse archers called the Aškuzai, making no distinction between Saka and Sugd people, as later writers did.

“The Fall of Nineveh” (1829) by John Martin.

Those Scythian and Sogdian horse-archers aided their Median and Persian cousins in sacking the great city of Nineveh, ending the Assyrian Empire’s iron grip. For the next 1,200 years, Mesopotamia would be ruled by Persian emperors.

But before long, the Sogdians began drifting back out to the mountains.

The Persians weren’t exactly thrilled about this, but they seem to have realized there wasn’t much worth conquering in Sogdiana. The land remained, officially, a province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire — and was “administered” (i.e., periodically squeezed for cash) by governors in the neighboring province of Bactria.

Sogdian Cavalry (left) and Turgesh Tarkhan (right).

But the Scythians’ and Sogdians’ free-riding lifestyle didn’t appeal to everyone in the Central Asian wilderness. In Part 3 of this series, you met the Royal Scyths — Scythians who left the nomad life behind to settle in fortified cities on the Black Sea coast, where they grew rich on cross-continental trade.

And as the Achaemenid Persian Empire rapidly unraveled in the 300s BCE—

Some provincial Persian governors decided they wanted a piece of that action, too.

In 330 BCE, the armies of Alexander the Great sacked the Persian capital of Persepolis, sending the terrified emperor Darius III fleeing eastward. Darius must’ve felt relieved when he arrived at the provincial capital of Bactria, on the western fringe of the wild steppe — the last island of Persian civilization on the edge of an utter wilderness.

The satrap (governor) of Bactria, man called Bessus, welcomed his exiled emperor with open arms — but the emperor had placed his trust in the wrong man. Before Alexander even had time to arrive on the scene, Bessus assassinated Darius—

And promptly set up his own independent state in Bactria.

Bessus’s mountain fortress, known as the Sogdian Rock.

In the mountains of what’s now Uzbekistan, Bessus constructed an imposing fortress known as the Sogdian Rock. He recruited a large force of Sogdians to patrol the frontier and keep it clear of nomadic Scythian raiders.

His endgame, apparently, was to set up a sort of tollbooth astride the Silk Road — keeping caravans safe from the savage Scythians in exchange for a reasonable fee.

It worked, for a while. In fact, Sogdian Rock became such a byword for safety that Sogdian chieftains began to store their valuables there. But all was not quiet on the Bactrian front.

Alexander the Great, as depicted on a Roman mosaic (long after his death).

Alexander the Great was defying all sane and reasonable expectations, as usual.

He refused to sit still and enjoy the unimaginable wealth he’d won in Babylon and Persia. No, against all odds, the Two-Horned One was marching east again — and this time he had his eye on Bactria and Sogdiana.

Alexander’s army marches into Bactria.

At Sogdian Rock, Bessus’s army began to panic. One Sogdian nobleman, Oxyartes, went so far as to beg Bessus to keep his daughter Roxana safe within the hilltop fortress until the fighting was over. Oxyartes must’ve made a convincing case, because Bessus agreed.

In the end, though, all the preparation made no difference.

Alexander’s army laid siege to Sogdian Rock, and the fortress fell in 327 BCE — just three short years after Bessus launched his Sogdian start-up.

The remains of the Sogdian Rock in modern-day Uzbekistan.

Alexander force-married Roxana (along with several other women he’d captured, as was his habit), stamped out the last remaining fires of Sogdian guerrilla resistance, and welded Bactria and Sogdia into a single province of his ever-expanding empire.

Before long, Greek settlers were pouring in from the West.

Sometimes they moved into Sogdian towns to construct Greek theaters and temples; other times they built new Greek-style cities completely from scratch, backed by Alexander’s mountains of Babylonian and Persian gold.

The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom at its height, in the 200s BCE.

From Egypt to Turkey and Iran, into Pakistan and Afghanistan, even down into the Indian Punjab, brand-new Hellenic (Greek) cities were popping up everywhere in the 200s BCE.

Although these cities were Greek in name (in fact, almost all of them were named “Alexandria,” after their patron), their cultures blended peoples and ideas from all the far-flung lands Alexander had conquered.

Greco-Bactrian architecture in Aurangabad Caves, India.

The lifestyle of these new cities interwove Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Indian and Sogdian influences into innovative styles of art and architecture — as well as novel kinds of clothes, songs, dishes, dances; and syncretic new faiths that integrated Persian Zoroastrianism and Indian Buddhism into Greek and Egyptian (and Bactrian) polytheism.

The Buddha depicted as a Greek god, in a sculpture from Gandhara (Peshawar in modern Pakistan).

Just walking up the high street of one of these cities must’ve been dizzying.

Among Greek pillars decorated with Buddhist imagery, you’d pass Seleucid soldiers in iron armor; as well as thick-bearded traders haggling in the Old Persian tongue over colorful bolts of Chinese silk, while merchants called from their stalls in Greek and Aramaic, beckoning you to examine their baskets of indigo and cinnamon and saffron.

The market in Samarkand a few centuries after the Sodgians… still thriving.

A group of veiled Sogdian ladies might glide by, as a pair of sandalwood-scented Buddhist monks passed on the opposite side of the street, chanting in Sanskrit; and across the square, fur-clad nomadic herders debated the price of sheep and goats in dozens of the Turkic, Mongolic and Indo-Iranian languages spoken by the peoples of the open steppe.

“Market in Jaffa” by Gustav Bauernfeind (1887).

If you were lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of some Han Chinese smugglers hurrying by in their ankle-length robes, whispering mysteries.

In short, these Greco-Bactrian trading hubs were some of the first cities in the world that were not only multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious — but genuinely multi-civilizational.

This was not the world the Sogdians intended to build.
It wasn’t even a world they wanted, at first.

But it was the world they inherited when Alexander’s empire collapsed, leaving these merchants the de facto brokers of the Silk Road — a world where Roman legions battled Chinese armies; where Greek philosophers debated Buddhist monks and Nestorian Christian bishops; where cities were not the strongholds of any single culture, but mixing-bowls where all cultures flowed and ran together like swirling paint.

Sogdian merchants, from a wall painting in Panjikent.

As their trade wealth continued to pile up, some of the Sogdian merchant-princes established their own dynasties in cosmopolitan cities like Samarkand, Panjikent and Bukhara. Within the walls of these entrepôts, they began to cultivate one of the most extraordinary civilizations in Asian history.

One of the easiest ways to get a basic feel for this culture, at its peak, is to look at how Sodgian aristocrats represented themselves in their visual art.

A Sogdian warrior slays a leopard from the back of an elephant, in this fresco from Panjikent.

Gaze at these paintings, and your first impression might be that they’re Chinese — but wait… sometimes the clothes and people look Persian.

Or maybe Indian. And the buildings in the background look almost Byzantine.

And yet, for all this cultural freestyling, Sogdian culture does not feel like any kind of forced mash-up of other people’s ideas.

Sogdian artists and philosophers had an astonishing gift for interweaving the best elements of all the ancient, illustrious civilizations around them into creations greater than mere sums of their parts.

Reading about Sogdian society, and looking at their art, one picks up a strong sense of — I can’t think how else to put it —taste.

A Sogdian noblemen, from a fresco in Panjikent.

The kind of instinctual, worldly taste that somehow just knows that Babylonian dates pair best with Greek wine; that the new Chinese dance will be more exciting if the harpists play in the Lydian mode; that that if we’re going to invite the Parthian ambassador to court, then of course we must invite that new Zoroastrian mystic on the same day.

The Sogdians didn’t actually write things like this, unfortunately.

And of course, you could easily say I’m just dreaming up a version of the Sogdians that I relate to, by backward-projecting my ideals of what “tasteful” society looked like in Versailles or Renaissance Venice.

A Sogdian woman does the dance known as the “Sogdian Whirl,” which was wildly popular all along the Silk Road. Unfortunately, the Sogdians didn’t reecord its steps, so no one knows how to do it anymore.

You could also point out that just about every society in world history has developed its own unique sense of elegance and taste, and that it’s somewhat misleading to call this out as a distinctive trait of Sogdian culture.

And that even if this was a defining trait of Sogdian culture, it can only have applied to the upper classes; the one-percenters.

You could say all those things, and you’d probably be right.

And yet — when you spend time with the art and literature of the Sogdian elite, it’s impossible to ignore the feeling that these people delighted in differences, and were fascinated by contrasts.

Sogdian heroes slay a mythical creature, in a fresco from Panjikent.

Sogdian rulers seem to have gone to great lengths, not to impress Sogdian ideas on anyone else, but to integrate all the ethnicities, aesthetics, religions and philosophies of their lands into one intricate societal symphony.

Perhaps it helped, in certain ways, that Sogdian civilization was never an empire, but a loose confederation of separate-but-equal city-states (a bit like Classical Greece).

Sogdian nobility, from a fresco in Panjikent.

Although the Sogdian upper crust of those city-states spoke a common language — a distant relative of Old Persian and modern Farsi — and shared a wealth of culture in common, each city was ruled by an independent king, who made laws according to his own rules—

And only cooperated with the others when their interests happened to align.

Within that flexible framework, Sogdian rulers and merchants made Central Asia the place to be if you wanted to exchange goods, money and/or ideas with people from distant civilizations, from the Mediterranean, through Mesopotamia and Persia, all the way to China.

Yet even as the Sogdian city-states established themselves as key centers at the heart of Eurasian culture, their own trading partners — the Romans, Persians and Chinese — continued to regard Sogdiana as a backwater wilderness. Chalk it up to cultural hubris, I guess.

Sogdian men shakin’ it on the dance floor, from a bas-relief in Dunhuang, China.

After all, the Sogdians didn’t have much of a pedigree, compared to civilizations like the Mesopotamians and Chinese, with their thousands of years of recorded history.

Perhaps that was one reason why Sogdian rulers like Divashtich (from whom we’ll hear more in a moment) tried to legitimize their lineage by claiming descent from ancient Persian kings.

At any rate, the Sogdians didn’t just squat behind their own walls.

For more than 1,200 years, from the 100s BCE all the way to the 1100s CE, you could’ve easily found Sogdians working their trade magic all across Iran, India, the Byzantine Empire — and most notably Tang China, where they brokered deals between the great powers at the far ends of the Silk Road.

Sogdian merchants made themselves so invaluable as middlemen that the Sogdian language became the semi-official lingua franca of the entire western half of the Asian continent. When the Turkic Khaganates swept across the Central Asian steppes in the 500s and 600s CE—

Even the Turks used Sogdian as the language of their court documents.

In fact, the Sogdians’ trade interests were so vast that they frequently kept whole Turkic armies on their payroll. Turkic princes sometimes ruled Sogdian city-states, or shared power with Sogdian rulers. Some contemporary sources even hint that the Turks looked up to the Sogdians as “mentors,” and hoped to be made full partners in the family business someday.

Sogdian text from a Manichaean creditor letter from around the 9th to 13th century.

Anyone who looked at Central Asia, as a whole, in the early 600s, would’ve had little doubt that the future of the Silk Road belonged to the Sogdians and their Turkic allies.

But nobody could’ve predicted the coming of Islam.

Tales of the unstoppable Arabian conquerors were spreading like wildfire across the Silk Road — but in the early 700s, it looked as if the armies of the new faith might’ve decided to stop and consolidate their conquests in Arabia, Lebanon and Iraq.

That, of course, was no more than wishful thinking. Like Alexander 1,000 years before them, the commanders of the Umayyad Caliphate wanted nothing less than the world. The armies of Islam rode east again, bent on conquest of Sogdiana.

Warriors of the Umayyad Caliphate.

In the beginning, the rulers of the Sogdian city-states didn’t put up much resistance. Compared with some other conquerors (like the Crusaders in centuries to come), Islamic rulers tended to be relatively tolerant of indigenous cultures and faiths, so long as Islam remained at the top of the pecking order.

As for the Sogdians, they didn’t much care whose palms they had to grease.

Just as long as trade kept flowing. Some of them even converted to Islam, as their ancestors had happily adopted Greco-Roman, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Christian beliefs.

Things seemed to be going smoothly for more than a decade — until the fateful year 717, when the fairly tolerant Umayyad governor of Sogdiana was replaced with one Al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah.

This zealot turned out to be too literal-minded for the Sogdians. He declared (unlike his predecessor) that anyone uncircumcised and illiterate in Arabic was not a true Muslim — which meant that all Sogdian men unwilling to undergo circumcision and learn Arabic were now required to pay the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims.

To live, essentially, as second-class citizens in their own city.

Even after that crackdown, infuriating as it was, most Sogdian rulers were not at all certain they wanted to go toe-to-toe with a peak-condition Islamic army.

The city of Samarkand, as it looked in the 700s CE.

But one by one, the dominoes began to fall.

Seven years earlier, in 710 CE, the Sogdian ruler of Samarkand — a man named Tarkhun— had been overthrown (and possibly killed) by a rebellion that was fed-up with his policy of Muslim appeasement. Tarkhun’s sons had fled to the city of Panjikent, where they’d been taken in by the local Sogdian ruler, a man named Divashtich.

Divashtich, for his part, was a faithful Muslim par excellence— or so he convinced the Umayyads. After the rebellion in Samarkand, Divashtich doubled down on his vow of loyalty to the Caliphate — and the Islamic governor responded in kind, addressing Divashtich as “King of Sogdia” —

And even hinting that the crown of Samarkand might be in the cards for him.

The balance began to shift, though, when yet another Sogdian ruler — a man named Gurak — tried to go behind the Caliphate’s back and secure military support from the Tang Chinese. The Umayyads found out, shut down the deal, and had Gurak executed.

Building the Great Mosque of Samarkand. Illustration by Bihzad for the Zafar-Nameh (late 1480s).

By now, the Caliphate’s governors were growing increasingly paranoid about Divashtich, too. One governor demanded that Divashtich send in his two sons as hostages, “just in case.”

That demand, it seems, was Divashtich’s breaking point.

He secured alliances with Sogdian rulers named Karzanj and at-Tar, and together they launched an anti-Arab rebellion across Bactria. But despite some initial successes, it turned out their fears were justified: they had no hope against a full-powered Islamic army.

To make matters worse, at-Tar betrayed the allies, revealing the location of Karzanj’s army to the Umayyad general Sa’id ibn Amr al-Harashi. The general showed up at the city where Karzanj was camped, slaughtered the Sogdian army, and butchered 3,000 Sogdian civilians for good measure.

The army of the Abbassid Caliphate, looking fairly similar to their Umayyad predecessors.

Left to fend for himself, Divashtich was not long for this world. Al-Harashi’s army caught up with him outside the city of Zarafshan (in modern Tajikistan), where they dealt him a crushing defeat. Divashtich and a few of his men managed to escape to a nearby fortress — but, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, they surrendered just a few days later.

Surprisingly, Divashtich’s captors seem to have treated him fairly well.

In the beginning, at least. He was kept in comfortable surroundings, and there was even talk of letting him go free with a promise of good behavior.

A Sogdian nobleman, from a fresco in Panjikent.

In the end, though, Al-Harashi swayed the judges to his point of view. Divashtich was crucified and beheaded. His head was sent to Iraq as a trophy of the final Sogdian defeat.

And so ended the reign of the great Sogdian city-states.

But at the same time, thousands of Sogdian people were still alive and well all across Asia. Like their Scythian forebears, they continued to trade, prosper, and even serve in high government positions, for centuries after their “subjugation” by a foreign empire.

Sogdian men at a banquet, from a fresco in Panjikent.

In China, Sogdian diplomats remained the key brokers of Silk Road trade, well into the 800s. In Byzantium, they negotiated a Christian-Turkic alliance against the Sasanian Persian Empire. Even Islamic geographers drew on Sogdian records as they worked to improve their maps of Asia.

Despite the fact that nobody seemed to want any independent Sogdian states around, the Sogdians had embedded themselves so deeply into Asia’s economy that it had become, quite simply, inconceivable to undertake international business without their help.

Sogdian culture was just “too big to fail.”

The Battle of Talas, as depicted in a later Chinese painting.

Even so, the political map was shifting. In 751 CE, Chinese and Islamic forces met in pitched battle for the first and only time in history, at the Talas River in what’s now Kyrgyzstan — the heart of golden-age Sogdian territory; not all that far, in fact, from the river where the lost Roman legion (maybe) met the Han Chinese force, 800 years earlier.

The Chinese crushed the armies of Islam (in part because the Caliphate’s Turkic mercenaries defected to the other side) — but from that point onward—

Neither the Caliphate nor China would ever make another serious grab for Central Asia.

With the two superpowers out of the neighborhood, new Persian and Turkic states now found room to rise — and Sogdian culture and language gradually began to give way before Persian in the East; Turkic in the North and West.

Along the way, the old Sogdian religions of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity were beginning to fade away in Central Asia. By the 1200s, just about everyone in the region (Sogdians included) was practicing Islam.

“Triumph” by Vasily Vereshchagin, depicting the Sher-Dor Madrasah in Samarkand.

Even then, some elements of Sogdian culture still survived. Though Al-Harashi had burned the city of Panjikent when he captured Divashtich, the Sogdian metropolises of Bukhara and Samarkand continued to serve as wealthy trade hubs under their new Turco-Persian overlords of the Ghaznavid and Khwarezmid dynasties, whom you’ll meet in Part 5 of this series.

And the Sogdians themselves are still around, too.

At least, their descendants are. The Yaghnobi people, who live in Tajikistan’s Sughd (“Sogdian”) Province, still speak a dialect of the Sogdian language; and some still practice Zoroastrianism. Their DNA contains certain genes that seem to have been in Central Asia forever, matching genes found in 3,000-year-old mummies of the Andronovo and Scythian cultures.

Yagnobi men (descendants of the Sogdians) in modern Tajikistan.

But despite all the Sogdian art and writing we still have—

Some fundamental quality of their world seems to be lost forever.

Because when we think of Central Asia today, its culture seems inextricably bound up with that of the Middle East. Look at a photo of modern Samarkand or Bukhara, for example (oh yes, they’re both still inhabited cities), and you’re looking at an undeniably Islamic place.

The city of Samarkand today.

In fact, it’s hard to even imagine a time when Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — let alone Iran and Pakistan and Afghanistan — were anything other than Muslim heartlands, from the soil on up. What would a Central Asia without Islam even look like?

Oh, but that’s precisely the world the Sogdians lived in, for upwards of 800 years!

Their Samarkand and Bukhara, their Pakistan and Afghanistan, were just as bustling and multicultural as those places are today — perhaps quite a bit moreso. But instead of mosques and minarets, you would see only Greek temples and statues of the Buddha; Indian monks and silk-robed Chinese merchants and Zoroastrian magi strolling among Classical colonnades.

The ruins of a Greco-Bactrian temple in Sanchi, India.

This Afghanistan and Pakistan are so different from the ones we know now that’s it’s hard to summon a clear mental image of them. It’s like trying to picture an alternate universe — a vision of a Central Asia that might have been, had things gone very differently.

But it’s no fantasy. That really was Central Asia, from the 200s BCE all the way to the 700s CE.

]]>2206Great Empires of Central Asia, Part 3: Pirates on a Sea of Grasshttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/10/28/great-empires-central-asia-part-3/
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 16:37:07 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1924They drank, smoked, plundered, raided and traded their way across ancient Asia. Meet the deadliest crew you’ve ever wanted to party with. I’ve experienced some surprisingly intimate moments at archaeological museums around the world. When I gaze into the lifelike eyes of a statue like that of Ebih-Il, or stumble upon a familiar name in…

]]>They drank, smoked, plundered, raided and traded their way across ancient Asia. Meet the deadliest crew you’ve ever wanted to party with.

I’ve experienced some surprisingly intimate moments at archaeological museums around the world.

When I gaze into the lifelike eyes of a statue like that of Ebih-Il, or stumble upon a familiar name in an ancient inscription, the centuries seem to melt away, bringing me and the other person together across thousands of years. For a few brief seconds, we meet in a time outside of time.

But my most intimate historical moment happened at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I was strolling through an exhibit of armor, clothes and weapons belonging to people who ruled Ukraine, western Russia and Siberia in the 500s BCE (around the same time that the city of Athens was entering her golden age, far to the west). And in one of those glass cases, I came face-to-face with an extraordinary relic.

It was a piece of human skin, frozen for more than 2,500 years in the dry soil of the Siberian tundra. This skin, from a man’s arm and shoulder, is the canvas for some of the world’s oldest surviving tattoos: fantastic beasts with antlers and hooves and curved beaks, clearly representing the apex of an artistic tradition about which we know next to nothing.

A preserved piece of 2,500-year-old Scythian skin.

I have these same tattoos on my own shoulders.

As I stared at that 2,500-year-old flap of skin, I felt an emotion that’s very hard to describe. That skin was not just a work of art; it was a part of that man’s body, as my tattoos are parts of mine.

Some of my ancient Siberian tattoos.

And I knew that if I met the owner of that skin on a snow-covered plain in the 500s BCE, I could bare my arm and he could bare his, and we could examine one another’s skin and compare our ink — and share, perhaps, a brusque nod of mutual respect.

The difference, of course, is that I got these tattoos because that man got them; because I found them online and loved the culture that produced them, and wanted to adorn my body with a reflection of that culture.

Their original owner, on the other hand, would have gotten those designs for reasons we understand only dimly — reasons connected, no doubt, with the shamanic nature-religion practiced by his people, and with artistic movements and aesthetic schools whose names and prodigies and great works are long-lost to us today.

All that remains of his world’s “softer” side are a few scraps of fabric and flaps of skin.

A Scythian horseman in full ceremonial get-up. And before you ask, yes; that is a real costume. I’ve seen the original in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

We have no records of his people’s great poetic epics, their popular songs, their typical dishes or courtship rituals or favorite jokes, because they did not write. We don’t know whether they even thought of themselves as a single people, or as more of a confederation, or even a subculture. (As we’ll see in a minute, there’s evidence for all three possibilities.)

The hints we do have, though, are tantalizing. Almost everything we know about this people (or these peoples) comes to us from their neighbors — literate civilizations like the ancient Assyrians, Greeks, Achaemenid Persians, and even the Zhou Chinese.

A Scythian nobleman on horseback.

Their own word for themselves almost certainly comes from the Iranian root sak– “to go; to roam.” This word lent them the name by which they were known most widely in their heyday, among the peoples they fought, raided and traded with, all across the vast continent of Asia: in Old Persian, they were the Sakā. In ancient Greek, Σάκαι. In Sanskrit, Śaka. In Old Chinese, Saik.

They were the Saka — the Ones Who Roam.

But we know them today by the name Herodotus gave them: the Scythians.

At their peak, the Scythians ranged freely across the vast belt of steppe-land that stretches from Hungary, Turkey and Ukraine in the west, to northern China in the east; from the Arctic Circle in the north to Iran and Afghanistan in the south.

The Eurasian steppe: an almost unbroken belt of flat land from Ukraine to Manchuria; from Siberia to Iran.

It’s very hard to convey, in these paragraphs, just how far this steppe culture reaches — both in space and in time.

The people of that unforgiving land have been living essentially the same lifestyle, with only minor variations, since at least the 3000s BCE (the age of the Sumerians), if not even earlier. They continued to live on horseback, in tents, straight through the European Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution — and if you go to Mongolia or Kazakhstan today (as I have), you’ll see that many steppe people are still living the same way right now.

Steppe life in modern Kyrgyzstan would be easily recognizable to a person of 3,000 years ago.

But that doesn’t mean nothing at all has changed in all those centuries.

For the first time in human existence, speed and distance were no longer limited by legs. People could fly now, sailing above the ground atop thundering hooves. Hunters could range across dozens of square miles every day in search of food — and warriors could ride for distant battlefields to raid their enemies.

With the domestication of the horse, steppe life would never be the same. (photo copyright Mike Reyfman)

Until the invention of the locomotive in the 1800s, the maximum speed of human land travel was equivalent to the speed of a horse. Until the development of landmines and fully-automatic rifles, horse cavalry were the spear-point of any respectable attack. As late as the 1910s, some generals were still insisting that horses would never become obsolete.

It’s no surprise, then, that the horse became the central feature of steppe life, as it still is today.

Like the Comanches, the Scythians were nomadic riders who knew their wilderness by heart. And like the Vikings, they were voracious feasters, and loved a good party after a successful raid.

In fact, the Scythians’ love for drinking was a byword in ancient Greece. In addition to strong (i.e., undiluted) wine, ancient sources mention that they also drank and/or smoked a plant called soma or haoma, which hasn’t been identified conclusively, but was clearly some kind of psychoactive drug.

Archaeologists weren’t sure how much of this reputation to believe (after all, Herodotus is known for being a bit of a tabloid historian) until 2015, when they dug up a Scythian grave and found a set of gold bongs coated with marijuana and opium residue. So we’ll just say these people clearly liked to party, and leave it at that.

A gold bong found in a Scythian burial mound in southern Russia.

But like many steppe peoples, the Scythians fought just as hard as they feasted. Like their successors the Huns and Mongols, they were archers of legendary skill, uncannily joined with the beasts they rode.

It’s no accident that Greek centaurs were famous for their archery skills.

And, most infuriatingly for their “civilized” neighbors, the Scythians refused to stand still and fight a pitched battle — a fact that, combined with the rarity of their permanent settlements, made it just about impossible to get a grip on them.

Despite a few brief exceptions (which we’ll get to in a moment), these people remained fiercely independent for centuries — subjugating local peoples and exacting tribute when they could; raiding from the fringes when they couldn’t. For settled peoples, the nomadic Scythians served as uncomfortable reminders of an older, wilder world that just refused to die.

For a reasonably close modern approximation of the Scythians, look no further than the Dothraki from “Game of Thrones.”

Who were these people, exactly? Where did they come from, and how did they last so long?

The Scythians invite a whole list of tempting comparisons: Comanches. Cherokees. Vikings. Celts. Mongols. Huns. Gauls. Hell’s Angels. And yet, although there’s something to be said for each of these analogies, none of them really gets to the heart of the Scythians — that unique “Scythian-ness” that makes them themselves, and no one else.

Scythian warriors on horseback.

Okay, fine — but what’s a “Scythian,” anyway? How close can we get?

Scythians were, at their cultural core, an Indo-Iranian people. We know that much — although, like many steppe cultures throughout history, they almost certainly incorporated people of many different ethnicities, including Turkic, Mongolic and Uralic groups.

In fact, much like the Celts and Mongols in later centuries — and the Andronovo warriors before them — the Scythians may not have been so much a single people, or even a strict confederation, as a loose-knit culture of men and women who practiced certain kinds of lifestyles. In other words —

The term “Saka” may originally have been less like the term “Greek,” and more like the terms “biker” and “buccaneer.”

In terms of lifestyle, the original “old-school” Scythians were akin to Turks, Huns and Mongols — or, for that matter, Cherokees and Sioux. They built huts of wood and animal pelts, hunted and raided for food, and (judging by the thousands of Scythian burial mounds we’ve dug up) lived in a relatively gender-equal society, as many steppe peoples have done for millennia, and still do today.

Among Scythians who lived as nomads on the steppe, both men and women could ride, fight, command, accumulate wealth, and pass it to their descendants. In fact, some historians (including Herodotus) have connected the Scythians with the legendary Amazon warrior women.

A female Scythian warrior.

A wide variety of different Scythian groups ruled and raided various swathes of modern-day Ukraine, southern Russia, Siberia, and possibly small areas of northern China, for about 800 years, from the 9th to the 1st century BCE.

Even in the days of ancient Mesopotamia, the Scythians were already a force to be reckoned with. In the 600s BCE, Assyrian records mention a nomadic horse-people called the Aškuzai, who were almost certainly Scythian. When the Medes and Persians banded together to sack the city of Nineveh and end the Assyrian Empire for good, the Aškuzai were right on the front lines, fighting beside their horse-archer brethren.

Scythian horsemen face off against Alexander’s cavalry at the Battle of Jaxartes. (Image by Alexander Deruchenko)

Around 300 years later, when Alexander the Great rode eastward to conquer Babylon, Persia and Bactria (now Afghanistan), he followed routes laid down by Scythian warriors and traders, centuries before him. Everywhere he went, he encountered Scythians and Scythian-like peoples — sometimes even fought them head-on, like at the Battle of the Jaxartes River, where his infantry managed to pin down and kill (he says) 1,200 Scythian horse-archers.

The Xiongnu (relatives of the Huns, or possibly even the same people) besiege the Great Wall of China.

Across thousands of years, China’s governors and generals did their best to handle Scythian, Mongolic, Turkic, Uralic, Yeniseian (Siberian) and multi-ethnic tribal confederations — with mixed degrees of success. Sometimes nomad confederations even conquered large swathes of China.

Unlike their poorer counterparts in the steppe’s mysterious interior, whom the Chinese called “uncooked barbarians” (shengfan 生番), the “cooked barbarians” (shufan 熟番) on the periphery, including the Scythians, tended to have much more nuanced — even cooperative — relationships with their city-dwelling neighbors.

Scythian merchants and warriors, modeling fashions from all across Europe and Asia.

In later years, some Scythian groups in the Baltic region settled down in fortified city-states, where they ruled the local populations as a wealthy aristocracy known as the “Royal Scyths.” But not all Scythians felt the urge to stop roaming. The continued presence of Scythian burial mounds throughout the Eurasian steppe makes it clear that many groups preferred the free-riding way of life — and even raided their urban cousins.

This diversity of Scythian ways of life, combined with the lack of firsthand accounts from Scythians themselves, can make it extremely tough to know what Greek and Persian writers mean when they say, “Scythians do such-and-such.”

Are they talking about all Scythians, or just certain groups?

For example, when Herodotus writes that “Scythia” is ruled by a dynasty of kings, he’s clearly talking about the Kingdom of Scythia, on the Black Sea coast. But he also describes “farming Scythians” and “nomadic Scythians” who live further east on the Eurasian steppe — which (of course, for clarity’s sake) he also calls “Scythia.”

Sometimes he seems to be implying that Royal Scyths of the Baltic city-states ruled all the nomadic tribes on the steppe (which definitely wasn’t the case), then in other passages he describes free-ranging Scythian hordes who refuse to submit to any ruler. Sometimes he calls out specific tribes by name, while other times he just says “Scythians” without specifying which ones he’s talking about.

A Scythian man and woman.

Some ancient chroniclers tried to make different sorts of distinctions — Achaemenid Persian writers, for example, distinguished the “Pointed-Hat Saka” (Sakā tigraxaudā) from the “Haoma-Drinking Saka” (Sakā haumavargā) — but it’s extremely difficult to know how much these labels had to do with the distinctions these peoples made among themselves.

Herodotus insists that they all called themselves “Scythian” — but who knows, really? After 800 years of expansion across Asia, many of them had drifted into lifestyles far different from the nomadism that had earned them the name “Saka” in the first place.

The Royal Scyths, for their part, were about as far from steppe barbarians as it’s possible to get. From their seats of power in city-states like Chersonesos, Sindica and Tanais on the coast of the Black Sea, they controlled a continent-wide trading network connecting Greece, Egypt, Syria, Persia, India and China.

You might’ve heard of this trading network. Today it’s known as the Silk Road.

Scythian nobles, around the 300s BCE.

Scythian noblemen and women often appear in their own art wearing tunics of fine Persian silk, along with fabrics, weapons, cups, bowls and cutlery manufactured by master craftsmen all across Asia. Many Scythian princes and princesses were buried with hoards of finely worked gold jewelry (as well as the aforementioned golden “medicinal waterpipes”).

A Scythian necklace, finely worked in gold.

This brings us to perhaps the most mind-blowing aspect of life on the steppe.

It wasn’t neatly divided up into separate cultural regions, like the areas around it were. It was a vast mixing bowl, constantly being stirred.

There are no oceans in that sea of grass. A few mountain ranges, sure. Some of the world’s harshest deserts. But very few uncrossable barriers between one subcontinent and another. Mostly it’s flat, empty, and easy to cross at a gallop. So it’s always been a melting pot where cultures blend — and an anvil where new ones are forged.

An eagle hunter in modern-day Mongolia.

And from the interior, new peoples were always fighting their way outward.

The names of these peoples read like a list of shadowy ancient nightmares: The Goths. The Huns. The Magyars. Hephtalites. Göktürks. Tatars. Mongols. These “uncooked barbarians” were poorer, colder, hungrier and more desperate than their “cooked” counterparts; and their desperation made them even more ferocious than their relatives on the fringes.

For “civilized” peoples, the steppe was an impenetrable black hole; its internal politics an utter mystery — and when an unknown tribe erupted from those depths without warning, burning farms and slaying villagers, it’s not hard to understand why priests of many religions described them as demons from hell.

Steppe raiders descend on their enemies.

This outward-pushing pattern played out time and again on the Eurasian steppe, for thousands of years. The Scythians themselves had dislodged a semi-settled people known as the Cimmerians, centuries earlier — and they, in their turn, would be displaced out of the fertile river valleys by their relatives the Sogdians (whom you’ll meet in Part 4 of this series), then kicked out of their heartland altogether by the Huns —

Who represented a sort of “Scythians 2.0,” at least in military terms.

Throughout the medieval period, successive waves of Turks, Uyghurs, Magyars and other peoples from the deep interior would push outward and settle (at least somewhat) into sedentary life — until they were overrun by hungrier, fiercer nomads… who looked quite a bit like their ancestors.

The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan arguably brought this pattern to a crashing finale. Though their empire fragmented and dissolved in just a few hundred years, in the 1300s CE, no other people has ever surpassed the Mongols in the art of steppe warfare.

A Mongol raiding party captures the Grand Prince Mtislav of Kiev in 1132 CE. Note the many ethnicities and clothing styles of the “Mongol” warriors — a variability that was often seen on the steppe.

In that sense, the Mongols represented the culmination of thousands of years of steppe culture — the climax of the “Scythian” way of life (which, of course, already existed long before anyone took the name “Saka”). And although no one ever did it as well as Genghis Khan and his sons, horse-nomad Khanates would continue to rule parts of Asia, well into the modern era.

Like the scale of the steppe itself, the timescale of steppe culture is so vast that it’s hard to fathom. But let’s try. If we were to draw a timeline from the domestication of the horse around 3000 BCE, all the way to — let’s pick a somewhat arbitrary date; say, Russia’s final conquest of the Siberian Khanate in 1598 CE —

That adds up to 4,598 years of unbroken cultural continuity on the Eurasian steppe.

Throughout all that time, the wild plains and tundras were ruled by free-ranging nomadic horse-archer peoples, whose cultures and ways of life would’ve been easily recognizable to one another. And if you go to Mongolia or Kazakhstan today, you’ll find that many people still live that same lifestyle.

Scythian culture never really died. It’s still with us right now.

But then, what happened to the Scythians themselves?

The exact chain of events is hard to pin down — but we’ve got enough contemporary anecdotes to give us a fairly good idea.

Scythian warriors, from the top decoration of a gold comb found in a Scythian noble’s grave.

Our most famous ancient source for info on Scythians — and the first source in the world to refer to them by that name — is Herodotus, the father of Greek history. Although he devotes a few lines to the Royal Scyths in their wealthy city-states, he leans toward a more romantic vision of the Scythian way of life, painting the steppe Scythians as courageous barbarians, who aren’t afraid to throw the Persians a well-worded diss when they’re in the mood.

Now, let me preface the following story by pointing out that our source here is a Greek historian renowned for his… shall we say… flair for the dramatic. He’s writing about a message sent by a Scythian king (whom he never met) to a Persian emperor (whom he also never met), during a campaign he learned about only through hearsay.

All the same, this story captures enough of the “feel” of Scythian chutzpah that I’m going to paraphrase it anyway.

In the early summer of 513 BCE, the armies of the Persian emperor Darius I were scouring the Central Asian steppes, in search of a Scythian horde they just couldn’t seem to catch. The Persians had already conquered everything from Turkey to eastern Iran — but they couldn’t seem to get a grip on the open prairie. Every time they thought they’d pinned the Scythians down, the nomads simply turned around, packed up, and ran away.

Scythian warriors battling Slavic horsemen.

This happened again, and again, until Darius finally sent this message to the Scythian king Idanthyrsus:

“Why do you keep fleeing, when I invite you to come and fight me? If you think you’re up to the challenge, then come take a stand! Or, if you admit your weakness, come bow before me, and offer me earth and water.”

Idanthyrsus sent this reply to the most powerful emperor in the world:

“This is our way, O Persian: I’ve never feared a man yet, or fled from one. My people do the same in war as we do in peace: we move. We have no towns or farms for you to capture or cut down. If you’re thirsting for a fight, come look for our fathers’ graves. But until you find them, we will never join battle with you, unless we see a good reason to do so. The Blue Sky is my only master. And instead of earth and water, I offer you only this invitation: Weep.”

The Emperor Darius tries to hide how deeply he’s hurt by the Scythian king’s diss. (Actually, this is Darius III, from the movie “Alexander,” 2004)

In this letter (as clearly Herodotus-flavored as it is) it’s easy to hear echoes of the Mongol Khans’ epic threats to their enemies; not to mention certain choice quotes from Native American leaders like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

Since the most ancient days, it seems, nomadic warriors have held their sedentary rivals in a sort of sneering disdain — as bikers and gang members mock nine-to-five office workers today. There’s something timeless about that rivalry. Something hugely relatable, too. When we hear these stories, we dream of pumping our fists right along with the rebel riders…

No matter what fate those rebels eventually met.

In the case of the Scythians, the Persians managed to subjugate some of them — like the “Pointed-Hat Scythians” who show up in the famous palace reliefs at Persepolis, bearing gifts for their new emperor. And there, one might think, ended the story of the free Scythians.

“Pointed-Hat Scythians,” from a staircase bas-relief at Persepolis.

But the truth wasn’t nearly so cut-and-dried.

Remember, different groups of Scythians lived all across Asia — some groups hunting and herding, others raiding and plundering, still others trading and growing wealthy inside walled towns and fortresses. And long after some of these groups were “subdued” by the Persians, their relatives were still ranging freely across the steppe, doing booming business with many peoples along the Silk Road… including the Persians themselves.

Meanwhile, far to the east, the Zhou Chinese were contending with another group of Scythians, whom they called the Sai (or Saik, 塞). Other Scythian groups were migrating south from the steppe into eastern Iran and India, where they set up a state called Sakastan (literally “Scythian Land”). Still others rode into the Tarim Basin of northwest China, where they converted to Buddhism and created the Kingdom of Khotan.

Like many other steppe conquerors before and after them, the Scythians were gradually being drawn (and/or pushed) off the open plains; dissolving into the wealthy city-dwelling cultures around them.

Scythian warriors in battle.

In China’s Tarim Basin, they seem to have aligned themselves with the ruling elite.

Mentions of Scythian names, and Scythian battles, gradually fade from local records throughout the early centuries CE. In Pakistan and northern India, Chinese sources record that groups of Scythians settled in the area of Kashmir (Jibin, 罽賓), which was already Hellenized in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. There, the Scythians vanished into a multi-cultural vortex, never to be heard from again.

In Europe, meanwhile, writers applied the term “Scythian” ever more vaguely to any horse-riding steppe people, making it still more confusing to try to identify which groups were “real Scythians” — whatever that even means, exactly.

Some Roman writers described the Goths as “Scythian,” while others applied the term to the related Sarmatian people, who also spoke the Scythian language, and conquered major chunks of former Scythian territory throughout the early centuries CE.

Scythian warrior women battling Sarmatians on the Russian steppe.

The term “Scythian” continued to pop up, in increasingly strange contexts, well into the Middle Ages — and beyond.

For example, in 860 CE, Byzantine chroniclers described Russian raiders as “Tauro-Scythians,” because they were believed to come from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey. Some modern Russians still do, in fact, claim the Scythians as their distant ancestors — though this is hard to prove, one way or the other. More imaginative writers have connected the Scythians with the Scots, or the Franks, or even some lost tribe of Israelites.

It’s not without reason, of course, that so many people want to claim Scythian blood.

As a historical journalist, I’m supposed to be unbiased — but there are some cultures I just like more than others. I can’t help it.

Even at a distance of 2,500 years, there’s just something undeniably cool about Scythians.

Of course, it’s that remove of centuries that lets us conveniently forget how terrifying they were to their enemies. Or how bad they probably smelled (Herodotus says they never bathed), or the lack of respect they evidently felt for literate society, or the unimaginable cruelties they must have inflicted on the peoples they raided.

From this far off in time, we have the luxury of looking only at the fun stuff they left behind, and thinking how exciting it must’ve been to be part of their crew — to get the cool tats; to ride shirtless with the wind in your hair; to live free and raid for plunder like a horseback buccaneer, with your warrior woman (or man) at your side.

]]>1924Great Empires of Central Asia, Part 2: Thunder on the Steppehttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/08/20/great-empires-central-asia-part-2-thunder-steppe/
Sun, 20 Aug 2017 12:11:31 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1767Long before the Huns, or the Mongols, or the Aryans, a different people ruled the Eurasian plains. Meet the inventors of thunderbolt-hurling sky gods. Imagine a time long before Asia’s vast interior was crossed by railroads or telephone lines. Thousands of years before anyone dreamed of the Silk Route; before there were friendly roads and…

]]>Long before the Huns, or the Mongols, or the Aryans, a different people ruled the Eurasian plains. Meet the inventors of thunderbolt-hurling sky gods.

Imagine a time long before Asia’s vast interior was crossed by railroads or telephone lines. Thousands of years before anyone dreamed of the Silk Route; before there were friendly roads and caravansaries to welcome travelers from across the desert. Long before anyone had heard the names of China, or India, or Rome.

It is 1900 BCE, or thereabouts. Far to the west, the Sumerians are experiencing their Renaissance, Egypt has entered its Middle Kingdom era, and Babylon is about to rise to power for the first time.

But here in Central Asia, there is only wilderness.

Picture yourself in a camp of animal-hide tents, surrounded on every side by a sea of open grassland and rolling hills, broken at distant intervals by small groves of trees swaying in the wind. Your only companions are the tight-knit group of people you’ve known all your life, and the herds of sheep, goats and cattle that accompany you in your migrations across the plains.

Your camp probably resembles this one, in Kyrgyzstan.

One morning, you hear a strange rumbling.

Putting your ear to the grass, you hear a thunder in the earth; an approaching storm unlike any you’ve ever heard.

Then you raise your eyes and see them pouring over the northern hills: men in horse-drawn chariots, clad in armor of fur and boiled leather, notching arrows to to the strings of great bows, whooping and shouting as they descend on your camp.

Now look back on this moment with modern eyes, and ask — who are these invaders?

Mongols? No, it’s thousands of years too early for them. Huns or Turks? They won’t be around for centuries. Aryans, perhaps? Closer, but still a few hundred years in the future.

A heavy chariot of the Andronovo people

While we don’t know what these people called themselves, we know them today as the Andronovo culture. Their charioteers controlled vast swathes of the Eurasian steppe for more than a millennium (roughly 2000 to 900 BCE), from the time of the Sumerians until shortly before the rise of the Scythians, whom you’ll meet in Part 3 of this series.

Ancestors of the Andronovo people

They raised at least one mighty city, and perfected the art of fast-paced chariot warfare at a time when other militaries relied on donkey-drawn wagons and lumbering ox-carts. Most impressively of all, they pioneered the model of a continent-spanning nomad empire, more than three thousand years before Genghis Khan.

And for all that, we know astonishingly little about them.

We know that at their peak, the territory they controlled stretched from what’s now southern Russia almost to the northern border of Iran; from the Caspian Sea to western Mongolia and parts of China. In other words, they spanned the Central Asian steppe — that sprawling ocean of grassland that has nourished nomadic populations since prehistory, and continues to do so today.

Their only significant immediate neighbors were the opulent Oxus Civilization, a.k.a. the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), whom you met in Part 1 of this series. Apart from the BMAC — who preferred to stick to their fertile riverplain — the Andronovo people largely had free run of the Central Asian steppe for more than a thousand years.

The range of the Andronovo culture at its greatest extent

Their ancestors came from the Sintashta culture, which is even less studied than its Andronovo descendants. Around 1900 BCE, the constantly warring Sintashta villages seem to have suddenly joined forces and exploded outward from their small territory, to conquer or absorb the surrounding tribes and construct a “Land of Towns” across thousands of miles of open steppe-land.

Perhaps they had their own “Genghis Khan,” uniting the tribes and spurring them on to greatness.

But even before this expansion, it’s clear that the Sintashta culture had already given birth to several key technologies, ideas and ways of life that would influence Asian, Middle Eastern and European culture for millennia to come. Sintashta (or proto-Sintashta) burials contain the earliest known horse-drawn chariots, developed from ox-carts around 3000 BCE — along with hoards of copper and bronze weaponry forged with strikingly expert skill.

A warrior of the Andronovo people

It’s also very likely that the Sintashta people spoke the common ancestor tongue of the Indo-Iranian language family, which would someday give birth to the Old Persian and Avestan languages, as well as modern Farsi, Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto, Kurdish, and dozens of other languages spoken throughout Asia today — as well as the Hittite and Mitanni languages of Mesopotamia’s chariot-riding conquerors.

Sometime around 1700 BCE, these people raised a great circular city in the heart of Russia.

We don’t know what its original inhabitants called it — but when Russian archaeologists discovered its ruins in 1987, they named it Arkaim.

A bird’s-eye view of the city of Arkaim, as it would have looked circa 1700 BCE.

At the city’s peak, approximately 2,000 people lived within its walls. Around a vast circular stronghold, two outer bastions of timber and clay brick enclosed sixty dwellings, most with hearths, cellars, wells and metallurgical furnaces. The houses’ doors opened on an inner circular street paved with wood, lined by covered drainage pits.

At the center of the city, a great rectangular complex, approached by four intricately constructed passages, served as a meeting space for thousands of inhabitants — and also as a focal point for shamanic ritual.

Andronovo people very likely observed shamanic rituals, like those still practiced by many steppe peoples today (as depicted on this Russian postcard from 1908).

For, like the great Oxus city of Gonur Tepe, Arkaim was no sprawling settlement grown out of control, but a planned city —

Constructed to reflect the order of Heaven on Earth.

As a matter of fact, scholars have noted that Arkaim’s structure of concentric circles closely reflects the model of the universe described in many schools of Indo-European spiritual literature, from the Vedas of ancient India (whose earliest passages date from around this same time) to the Avesta of Persian Zoroastrianism (which appeared a few hundred years later, around 1300 BCE). The city’s structure of three concentric rings of walls and three radial streets precisely replicates the layout of the legendary King Yima’s sacred city, described in the Rigveda.

In short, when we look at Arkaim — and at the myriad burials of Sintashta and Andronovo people arrayed across the steppe —

We seem to be gazing into the very birth of Indo-Aryan culture.

The chariots and bows of northern India’s warrior aristocracy are here. So are the roots of ancient Persian philosophy, and the ancestor of all Indo-Iranian languages. Here is the thunder of wheels across the plains, and Zeus and Thor and Indra hurling lightning-bolts from the sky.

From the goats to the chariot to the lightning, all the elements are present in the Andronovo warrior culture

But were the Andronovo people actually Aryan?
Were they Indo-European at all?

The answer to that question is more complex than it first appears. In fact, it raises a specter that’s haunted Central Asian archaeology for more than a century: how exactly do we classify these people, when they don’t seem to fit into any of our neatly labeled boxes?

The great mixing bowl of the Asian steppe makes mincemeat of such classifications.

One theory that enjoyed some early popularity was that the Andronovo people were ancestors of the Aryan charioteers who later ruled northern India. Andronovo people clearly favored the horse-drawn chariots beloved by many Indo-Iranian peoples. They also seem to have worn the tunics and trousers later made famous by Indo-Iranian warriors like the Scythians and Sarmatians.

But this “pure Indo-Iranian” theory just doesn’t fit the data.

Research on Andronovo bodies preserved in the frigid steppe soil has revealed that many of their skulls “exhibit pronounced Caucasoid features,” and that their DNA is similar to that of modern Caucasian peoples, containing genes for pale skin, blue eyes and blond hair.

Reconstructions of the faces of Andronovo people, based on remains preserved in the soil

So were the Andronovo people more like “Vikings in chariots?”
No, not that, either.

They also possessed several genes now found in Kazakh, Mongol and Siberian populations, hinting that (at least some of) the Andronovo people may have had epicanthic folds around their eyes, and may have resembled modern Kazakh or Siberian people at least as much as Swedes or Finns.

Ordinary people of the Andronovo culture

Their cultural organization was just as varied. While some Andronovo people dwelled in large planned cities like Arkaim, thousands of others lived in tents as they traveled with their herds — perhaps even switching between the two lifestyles seasonally, as many Central Asian people do today.

A family of the Saami people of Finland, circa 1900

They rode chariots and fought with bows and arrows like Indo-Aryans, and the structure of their burials clearly hints at an affinity for patriarchal sky gods — yet they freely mixed these beliefs with a (presumably much older) system of shamanic practices, worshiping the Blue Sky and a myriad of nature spirits, as many peoples of the Asian steppe still do.

An Andronovo shaman

In fact, the Andronovo people seem to have been more of a loose confederation — a cultural movement, even — than a centralized civilization per se. Whatever name they gave themselves, they may have used it more as we use terms like “biker” or “goth” — referring not to citizens of an empire, but to people who follow a certain kind of lifestyle.

As a cultural movement, the Andronovo people likely spoke a variety of languages (including Finno-Ugric languages similar to modern Finnish, Indo-Iranian tongues distantly related to Persian, and ancestors of the Yeniseian languages spoken in Siberia), practiced a mixture of hunting, herding and urban ways of life, and readily imported tools and technologies from the peoples to the west, south and east of their heartland.

And yet, they would NOT have considered themselves a “mishmash,” but a proud and distinctive culture.

By comparison, consider the Tajik people of modern Asia. Their DNA carries a mix of Turkic, Mongolic and Caucasian genes. They may have pale or tan skin, dark or blond hair, and green or brown eyes — some with epicanthic folds like those of Chinese and Mongolian people. They speak an Indo-Iranian language, and mainly practice Islam.

Over the centuries, many cultures and ethnicities have tried to claim the Tajik people as their own — even as the Tajiks have remained proudly and distinctively themselves.

A group of Tajik people, displaying a range of physical characteristics that may also have existed among Andronovo people

The Andronovo people may very well have represented a similar story. Among themselves, their varied culture and physical appearance would have made perfectly obvious sense. How could it be otherwise? It’s only today, when we look back from our world filled with a dozen or more divergent lines of their offspring, that these people seem so hard to classify.

This is another theme that will resound throughout this series — our unfortunate tendency, as modern outsiders, to instinctively think of Central Asian peoples as “in-betweeners.”

Uyghur camel drivers in Xinjiang, China

We know what Chinese people, for example, look like; and we know what Persian or Greek or Indian culture is — so therefore the Andronovo people and the Sogdians and Khwarezmians, whose empires interwove elements also found in those better-known civilizations —

They must be cultural and genetic “mutts,” right?

But in truth, aren’t we all cultural and genetic mutts?

Every civilization in history has drawn on influences from neighboring cultures. None of us can lay exclusive claim to all the foods, architectural motifs, musical genres and clothing styles found in any of our cities on any given day — much less to the colors of our skins or the shapes of our eyelids.

Uzbek women in Kyrgyzstan

If we want to understand a culture, we have to resist this urge to classify it as “half this” and “one-third that.”

Andronovo people were not Nordic, or Mongolic, or Turkic, or Iranian, or Siberian. They were not “white,” nor were they any other ethnicity we’d immediately recognize today.

All those words describe elements of their culture and genetics that we might recognize when we see them among other, later peoples. But their culture stood on its own; an utterly unique achievement in human history.

]]>1767Get Your Copy of “The Cradle and the Sword!”http://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/08/18/the-cradle-and-the-sword-is-here/
Fri, 18 Aug 2017 04:49:51 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1746Read Chapter 1 right now for FREE. A historical opera of sweeping proportions, The Cradle and the Sword hurtles the reader from the classical ages of Greece and Persia back into the mists of prehistory, chronicling the wars, intrigues, discoveries and triumphs of the world’s first great civilizations. A web of tales brings together an…

A historical opera of sweeping proportions, The Cradle and the Sword hurtles the reader from the classical ages of Greece and Persia back into the mists of prehistory, chronicling the wars, intrigues, discoveries and triumphs of the world’s first great civilizations. A web of tales brings together an unforgettable cast of characters, united across thousands of years by common struggles, ambitions, and dreams. Thomas unveils an odyssey in reverse, tracing a myriad of intertwined paths, from the palace conspiracies of mighty Assyria to the lush gardens of Babylon, to the primeval city of Ur—revealing an action-packed saga whose deepest roots reach back to legendary Eden itself.

]]>1746Great Empires of Central Asia, Part 1: Primeval Beginningshttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/04/30/great-empires-central-asia-part-1-primeval-beginnings/
Sun, 30 Apr 2017 03:59:20 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1494They inspired Sumerian cities, Indian trade and Persian art. Meet the most influential civilization you’ve never heard of. In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists traveled deep into Turkmenistan’s Kara-Kum Desert, which most people can’t even point to on a map. This might seem a strange place to seek the ruins of a lost civilization. But that’s…

In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists traveled deep into Turkmenistan’s Kara-Kum Desert, which most people can’t even point to on a map.

This might seem a strange place to seek the ruins of a lost civilization. But that’s exactly what they were searching for.

Here in this unforgiving landscape, “Black Sand” (as the desert’s name means in the Turkmen language) sprawls across more than 200,000 square miles (350,000 sq. km.) northeast of Iran; a salt-flat scoured by sandstorms, sun-hammered by day, near-freezing at night. It’s one of the most sparsely populated environments on earth, with an average of just one person per 2.5 square miles (6.5 sq. km.).

The Kara Kum desert in modern Turkmenistan.

But it was not always this way. Nearly 5,000 years ago, this plain was a fertile river basin, fed by currents rushing down from the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. Wheat and barley grew here, along with date-palms and fruit trees. Herds of sheep and goats grazed on grass along the mountain slopes.

In other words, this riverplain once resembled the valley of Mesopotamia — not only in its ecology, but also in culture.

For as those Soviet archaeologists pressed further south into the sandy wastes, they discovered a network of ancient mud-brick cities. Among the cities’ collapsed walls, the researchers found finely worked bronze jewelry, ceramics and stonework — much of which seemed to blend the style of the Sumerians with the aesthetics of the Indus Valley civilization further east.

A sampling of artifacts discovered at Gonur Tepe

Wondering, “Why haven’t I heard of this?!”
Well… I’m getting to that.

At the time, the archaeologists were just as baffled as anyone. Had they discovered a string of far-flung Sumerian outposts? Or could it be they’d stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization — a contemporary of the empires of Sumer and the Indus Valley, and perhaps the first great trading link between the East and West?

Unfortunately, the rest of the world felt no suspense, because few readers outside the Soviet Union even heard of the discoveries. The researchers gave the civilization the tongue-twisting name of “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex,” and published their findings in Russian, in obscure Soviet academic journals, at a time when the East and West were not exactly keen on sharing their latest breakthroughs with one another.

The Kara-Kum Desert

Then in 1979, revolution and war broke out in Iran and Afghanistan, and most archaeologists fled the region. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 only buried the puzzle deeper. And so, the mysterious civilization’s remains waited beneath the sands.

The ruins of an ancient city, at a site now known as Gonur Tepe, Turkmenistan

But although this civilization was “lost,” for a time, it was never entirely forgotten. Viktor Sarianidi, an Uzbekistan-born Greek archaeologist, had been obsessed with the ruins of the Kara-Kum since the 1950s, when he’d first toured the desert as a researcher for the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow. In the 1970s, he’d pressed deeper into the desert than any of his colleagues, and had stumbled on a series of intriguing clay mounds — which are often signs of ancient mud-brick buildings worn down to rubble — near a site called Gonur Tepe in Turkmenistan.

Now you can proudly say you can find Turkmenistan on a world map!

Sarianidi and his team grew obsessed with the site, convinced something important was buried there. Until at last, in the early 1980s—

They finally got the funding to start a full-scale dig.

Sarianidi was never an archaeologist of the modern school, dusting off tiny shards of pottery for hours on end. Instead, he’d have been very at home in the Victorian glory days of “gentleman explorers,” when common practice was to dig quickly, tearing through walls and breaking open tombs in search of celebration-worthy discoveries. That’s exactly what Sarianidi did at Gonur Tepe — and his findings exceeded even the wildest expectations.

The full plan of the ancient city at Gonur Tepe

Around a vast central citadel surrounded by mud-brick walls and towers, Sarianidi and his team excavated an even greater wall with square bastions, surrounded in turn by a third oval wall enclosing an entire city of temples, marketplaces and houses. Wheeled carts once rolled along the city’s paved roads.

A reconstruction of the walls and central citadel at Gonur Tepe, as they may have looked circa 2300 BCE.

Canals from the Murgab River flowed through its heart, providing clean water to an intricate system of wells and irrigation canals. Clearly, this was no slapdash settlement grown to unmanageable size — it was a planned city, just as beautifully arranged as the urban centers of Sumer and the Indus Valley.

And that was just the beginning of the mystery.

I’m not saying this is definitive proof of anything — just enough to make you wonder.

In many of the houses and temples, Sarianidi’s team dug up delicately worked jewelry of gold and silver, set with carnelian and lapis lazuli — the latter of which appears in Sumerian jewelry, but had to be mined near Gonur Tepe, in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The art displays workmanship every bit as fine as that of master Egyptian and Sumerian craftsmen, and features a repertoire of motifs any Sumerologist would recognize: men with mustache-less beards and high-waisted skirts; women in plaited dresses and mantles; heroes clutching snakes and battling mythic monsters.

Again, not saying this is proof — just enough to make you very seriously wonder.

In fact, Sarianidi’s team discovered several Sumerian cylinder-seals (stamps used as “signatures” on locks and documents) among the ruins, proving that these people — whoever they were — had some kind of trade link with the Sumerians.

But influences from all across Asia were obvious, too.

Gold and silver castings of winged lions and eagle-headed men bear a striking resemblance to art discovered in the treasure-hoards of the (much later) Achaemenid Persian Empire. Metal disks found in some of the houses resemble the wheels of chariots used by later Indo-Iranian people like the Scythians.

Gold and silver casting of a winger lion and eagle-headed man, found at Gonur Tepe

The ruins at Gonur Tepe even contained several of the distinctive clay seals used by Indus Valley traders —contemporaries of the Sumerians who constructed their own planned cities at sites like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro — bearing inscriptions in the still-untranslated Indus Script.

A clay stamp from the Indus Valley civilization, with an inscription in the mysterious Indus Script

Perhaps most intriguing of all, Sarianidi and his team dug up clay bullae (similar to those used by Sumerian merchants to record economic transactions) carved with mysterious symbols unlike those of any known writing system.

Though it sounded too wild to believe, the ruins at Gonur Tepe (and those of other cities found nearby) seemed to demonstrate the existence of a previously unheard-of civilization — one that boasted a system of cities with planned urban architecture, sprawling across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; along with a continent-spanning trade network, and a unique system of proto-writing. All in the 2000s BCE.

Clay bullae discovered at Gonur Tepe, bearing symbols that may be a form of proto-writing

What exactly does this mean for world history?

Perhaps the Sumerians aren’t as unique as we always thought. Experts have long puzzled over Sumerian trade records’ mentions of mysterious eastern lands like Magan and Meluhha. The consensus is that these names referred to Oman and the Indus Valley, respectively — but who can be certain?

Chemical analyses of Sumerian artifacts have revealed that much of their gold and silver was mined in Asia — and scholars have long recognized that bright blue lapis lazuli can’t be mined in Mesopotamia, and can only have arrived via some eastern trade route.

A stone seal found at Gonur Tepe. The motif of a man clutching two serpents is very common in Mesopotamian art.

But the really intriguing question is one of precedence. Who invented the world’s first planned cities: the Sumerians, or the people of Gonur Tepe? What about the wheel, or writing, or irrigation, or a myriad of other famous Sumerian inventions, which the Oxus Civilization (as the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex is now known) seem to have had at around the same time?

What if Sumer wasn’t actually the epicenter of the “Cradle of Civilization” at all, but represented a culture on the far western fringe of an Asia-spanning complex of cities, trade networks and cosmopolitan melting pots?

Historians have made similar mistakes before.

Central Asian cultures tend to get skipped over as “nomadic tribes” or “steppe peoples.” Gazing out on tent-camps and barren plains, a traveler might naturally assume that any cities ever raised here must have been mere temporary flukes — experiments in urban living that quickly imploded, leaving the nomads to return to their “natural state.”

The truth, however, is that a whole procession of magnificent cities have towered over Central Asia, which was once the crossroads of civilization. Everyone’s heard of Babylon and Baghdad — but what about Bukhara and Samarkand, which were once equally prestigious and wealthy? They both still stand today, largely forgotten by the outside world.

Alas, this is a theme we’ll see again and again in this series: as trade routes dry up and wars sweep the land, the mighty citadels between the Caspian Sea and the Gobi Desert are raided and trampled without mercy, until at last they’re swallowed by the sand — or reduced to mere shadows of their former selves.

Ruins at Gonur Tepe

In the case of the Oxus Civilization, its people flourished for nearly six hundred years, from the 2300s to the 1700s BCE — when the climate abruptly grew drier throughout the Middle East. Relentless droughts drained the Murgab River, cutting off the city’s lifeblood (just as, far to the west, the Sumerian fishing-marshes were rapidly drying up).

But unlike in Mesopotamia, no new empire swept in to occupy and exploit the cities around Gonur Tepe. No one’s quite sure why — largely because this region’s ancient history is insanely under-studied. No one’s even certain who the surrounding peoples were (aside from the Andronovo culture, whom you’ll meet in Part 2 of this series).

This brings us to a second theme that will resound throughout this series: the infuriating obscurity that surrounds the great cultures of ancient Central Asia.

I mean, if you think Sumerian culture is hard to research… just wait until you Google the excavation at Gonur Tepe. You’ll find no more than a few articles, even fewer research papers, and some lovely photos of artifacts discovered in the ruins (most of which I’ve shared with you in this article). Most sadly of all, you won’t find even a single artist’s rendering of the daily life or clothing of the typical Oxus citizen.

I’ll leave you to puzzle this one out for yourself.

That means I can’t tell you the sorts of things I know you come to this site to learn — what Oxus people ate for dinner, how their everyday clothes looked, which gods they worshiped, or what their music sounded like. I can’t tell you a single sentence of their language, because we don’t know what tongue they spoke.

Oh, there are theories, of course. We can make tentative guesses based on civilizations that seem to be the cultural descendants of the Oxus people, such as the Scythians and Sogdians (whom you’ll meet in Part 3 and Part 4 of this series).

But those peoples arrived in the region more than a thousand years after the Gonur Tepe site was abandoned. So it’s a little like trying to reconstruct ancient Roman culture and language by studying Renaissance Italy.

You can see the problem there.

Still, one intriguing hint may come from Sarianidi’s final research project, undertaken just a few years before he died. In the early 2000s, he and his team played their hunch that the Oxus people might have been related to the inhabitants of sites like Anau, a settlement at the base of the Kopet-Dag mountains, about 225 miles from Gonur Tepe.

Ruins of walled towns in Anau date back to 6500 B.C. — centuries before the first Sumerian cities, when the stone-age proto-city of Çatalhöyük flourished in what’s now Turkey. The people who lived in Anau grew the same crops as the people at Gonur Tepe, and their pottery and wheeled carts closely resemble those found in the ruins of Oxus cities.

A reconstructed horse burial in a house (or temple?) at Gonur Tepe

These similarities have led some archaeologists to suspect that the Oxus culture evolved from this Kopet-Dag culture— which (of course) is even less studied than the culture at Gonur Tepe.

In a way, this obscurity is understandable. We’re dealing with ruins in the heart of a war-torn desert, dating from a period of prehistory where even the world’s best-preserved sites yield only sparse cultural clues. It’s only by one of those chance miracles of ecology that anyone’s found any evidence at all.

At any rate, by this point you know just about as much as I do about the Oxus Civilization — and far more than most ancient-history buffs. Strange as it sounds, you know nearly as much as the leading experts on this culture — of which there are, perhaps, a grand total of five in the entire world.

In fact, you know about as much as anyone’s going to know about the Oxus culture, until someone brings back fresh evidence from Gonur Tepe and starts analyzing it in a systematic way. There are definitely interested parties. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

So now you’re officially an ancient history hipster.

Next time someone brings up their favorite “lost civilization,” you’ll be able to say, “Oh, you like the Sumerians? That’s cute. They’re pretty mainstream. Me, I’m a fan of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Their style is hard to classify, but they basically invented bronze-age civilization. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of them.”

]]>1494Great African Empires, Part 6: The Tattooed Lords of the Deserthttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/03/17/great-african-empires-part-2-the-tattooed-lords-of-the-desert/
Fri, 17 Mar 2017 19:35:12 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1046Meet the nomad warriors who conquered Egypt, battled Rome, and ruled Spain. If you grew up watching Star Wars (like I did), you probably dreamed of visiting Tatooine, the desert planet where Luke Skywalker gazed up at the twin suns and imagined becoming a Jedi. Like a surprising number of things in sci-fi and fantasy,…

It’s a town in Tunisia, North Africa, where many of the desert scenes in Star Wars were actually filmed. And while it’s not home to any starships or aliens, its true story is every bit as strange.

In my first article of this “Great African Empires” series, I mentioned that people in North Africa were living in settled villages, practicing farming and animal agriculture, as early as the 11,000s BCE —

A full 7,500 years before the Great Pyramid was built.

Tatouine today

These people — whatever they originally called themselves — may have been related to the Natufian culture of the nearby Levant region (roughly modern Syria and Palestine). They’ve left us no writing, but they probably spoke some variant of the Proto-Afroasiatic language family that was widely spoken throughout North Africa at this time.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series, the original Proto-Afroasiatic language is so old that it’s the common ancestor of both ancient Babylonian and modern Swahili — along with Arabic, Hebrew and many other Middle Eastern languages, ancient and modern.

Though they didn’t have writing, these North African farmers did leave us a rich library of visual art — most notably the rock paintings and engravings at Tassili n’Ajjer and Wadi Tashwinat, which depict animals like crocodiles and gazelles, as well as tribal activities like hunting and dancing, with stunningly expert skill.

A Stone-Age Berber rock carving in Libya, perhaps as old as 9,000 BCE

Tassili n’Ajjer is mostly desert today, but its name means “Plateau of the Rivers” — a reference to a time, perhaps as far back as 11,000 BCE, when the plateau’s climate was wet enough to support vast fields of crops and grazing grass. Over thousands of years, these populations of farmers and herders — who probably originally spoke many different languages and practiced many different lifestyles and customs — coalesced into a vast tribal confederation.

Thousands of years later, the ancient Greeks would call these people barbaroi, “barbarians,” a slur they made their own and wore as a badge of honor, earning them the name “Berbers,” which is what they’re still called by most outsiders to this day.

But in their own language, they call themselves the Imazighen.

This term, too, is of uncertain origin and meaning. It dates from no earlier than the Byzantine period, and may have referred to a different tribe, or to several tribal groups in the area. Thus, sadly, their original name for themselves seems to be permanently lost to history.

Our only concrete sources are archaeological sites, along with a few brief references by foreign writers in much later periods. But we do know that since prehistoric times, people in North Africa had buried their honored dead in tombs, which evolved over the centuries into the enormous stone mounds and pyramids raised throughout the 300s and 200s BCE. These people also constructed megalithic sites (arrangements of huge rocks, similar to Stonehenge), which seem to indicate that they worshipped the stars, and perhaps other heavenly bodies as well.

While some Berbers later worshipped Egyptian gods like Isis, Osiris and Set, they’ve always insisted that certain deities worshipped by the Egyptians — especially Neith and Amunet — had originally been Berber gods and goddesses. In fact, the Egyptian ram-god Ammon (Amun) may indeed be older than Egypt: worship sites associated with Ammon have recently been discovered in the desert of Libya — the heart of Berber territory — and dated to as early as 9,600 BCE.

How much of their culture did the ancient Egyptians “borrow” from these Stone-Age nomads of the Libyan plateau, with their astronomical expertise and animal-faced gods?

We may never know the full story.

A Berber woman

If they lived anything like modern nomadic Berbers, these ancient people probably organized themselves on a clan basis. Chieftains ruled groups centered around a certain geographical location, such as a well or a grazing-ground, or around a certain way of life, like hunting or sedentary farming. Nobles may have held monopolies on certain arms and armor — as they held monopolies on owning guns in much later centuries — and collected taxes from vassals who tended herds of goats and cattle.

Artisans probably belonged to a separate caste, as they do in many Berber societies to this day; and those who produced certain specialized objects may have held special roles in annual rituals, as only certain castes in modern Berber societies sacrifice animals at Islamic festivals. They probably also owned slaves, as many Berbers do today.

A Berber woman in the early twentieth century

Their men probably wore turbans, and women, veils; long centuries before Islam came to their lands. Men and women both wore distinctive tattoos on their faces and hands — elaborate networks of symbols, rich with meaning.

Since prehistoric times, these people had led vast caravans across the Sahara, trading with people along the northwest African coast, and perhaps as far east as the Nile Delta. They were known for their sharp swords and elaborate jewelry, and for their fine flutes and drums, which they played with legendary expertise.

And in the empty expanse of the desert, they had only one way to navigate: by the stars, which became their trusted friends. Long before the first Egyptian pharaohs raised the first sun-temples, the ancestors of the Berbers carved their knowledge of the heavens in solid rock.

The royal mausoleum of Medghassen, in Algeria

A dynasty of Berbers actually did rule ancient Egypt for more than 200 years, from 945 to 715 BCE. They were known (in Egyptian records) as the Meshwesh, and they represented the spearhead of a millennia-spanning struggle between the Egyptian pharaohs and the tattooed, long-haired tribes of the Libyan plains.

Usually the pharaohs’ armies managed to beat the Berber forces back — but during the rule of the 19th and 20th Egyptian Dynasties (c. 1295–1075 BCE), the Meshwesh intensified their assault, seized control of the Egyptian throne, and established a line of Berber pharaohs, starting with Osorkon the Elder. This dynasty ruled until its last pharaoh was, in turn, unseated by the army of the Nubian Kushite king Piye, whose dynasty ruled Egypt for the next few centuries.

The Berber pharaoh Osorkon the Elder

But the Berbers never lost control of the Libyan heartland. And centuries later, when the Carthaginians — expert seafaring traders of Phoenician descent, who spoke a language related to Hebrew— sailed west from the area of modern Palestine to colonize North Africa, they made sure to seek alliances with the local Berber rulers. In fact, the Carthaginians recognized the combat skill of the Berber armies — and when the Romans invaded in the First Punic War —

The Carthaginians hired thousands of Berbers as mercenaries to fight the Roman invaders.

Unfortunately for the Carthaginians, the Romans won the First Punic War—and, as usual, they imposed crippling peace terms on their defeated enemies, purposefully taxing the Carthaginians into (temporary) poverty. The Carthaginian leaders, finding themselves very short on cash all of a sudden, refused to pay their Berber mercenaries—a decision that would have dire consequences for both sides.

The outraged Berbers launched a Mercenary War against their former employers, the Carthaginians—who sent in the merciless general Hamilcar Barca to eliminate the Berber threat. Barca, who’d made his name as a vicious guerrilla fighter against the Romans , inflicted “truceless war” on his Berber opponents. His methods were shockingly brutal even by the standards of the time: horror stories of his predilections for torture, crucifixion and other unusual atrocities spread across North Africa, even reaching ears as far away as Rome.

Romans Battling Carthaginians in the Punic Wars

In the end, the relentless Carthaginian armies managed to capture the Berber leaders and regain control of their territory—but oddly enough, they didn’t drive their conquered enemies away. Berbers continued to live in their tens of thousands throughout the cities and countryside of North Africa—and less than a century later, they’d carved out a number of independent kingdoms of their own.

The king of one of these kingdoms—a warrior known as Masinissa—allied with Rome against the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War; and once the Romans had defeated the Carthaginians yet again, they stuck around to help Masinissa wipe one of his rival kings (a guy named Syphax) off the map. Now that he was free of serious local competition, Masinissa unified all the local Berber kingdoms into one great kingdom called Numidia (literally, “Nomad Land”).

Masinissa enriched his realm with monumental architecture and beautiful art — and around this time, the Berbers also developed their own unique writing system, the Tifinagh script, probably adapted from the Phoenician alphabet used in Carthage.

A version of that script is still used throughout North Africa today.

Text in Arabic (top) neo-Tifinagh script (middle) and French (bottom) on a sign in Morocco

But that golden age was not to last. A few generations later, Masinissa’s illegitimate grandson Jugurtha, a popular hero for some reason, killed the heir to the throne and sparked a war with Rome — a quagmire worthy of the modern Middle East, in which the Numidians’ relentless guerilla tactics wore down the Roman legions man-by-man, and ever-present bribery and sneak attacks removed any hope of trust between the Romans and the local civilians.

What was supposed to be a quick “surgical strike” devolved into a knock-down drag-out nightmare that stretched on for six years, sparking outrage and protests back home in Italy. In the end, though, Jugurtha was finally captured, and was dragged back to Rome in chains.

All Numidia bore the punishment for Jugurtha’s crimes.

The Romans treated the conquered Numidians much as they’d treated the Carthaginians before them: they imposed crippling taxes that starved the Numidian cities, spreading poverty and sparking revolts. Urban centers slowly collapsed as more people returned to sustainable small-scale farming and herding. And so the situation remained for a very long time.

More than 800 years later, when the armies of Islam arrived in North Africa in the 700s CE, they found the land populated sparsely by tribes of Berber nomads, their faces tattooed and swathed in cloth, their eyes scanning the outsiders with suspicion. Of the once-great Numidian cities, only abandoned ruins remained.

A medieval Berber warrior

It’s not exactly clear why the Berbers put up relatively little resistance against Islam, or why this new religion integrated into Berber culture so much more deeply and permanently than the influences of Egypt, Carthage, Greece or Rome ever did. By the early 1000s CE, nearly all the nomadic Berber tribes had converted to Islam, and the religion had permeated every aspect of their society, from war and law to marriage and education.

Confederations of Arabic and Berber tribes began to inflict persecution on the surrounding Christian, Jewish, and animist (nature-worshipping) communities. In the 1120s, the Berber-led Almohad Caliphate launched attacks north into Al-Andalus (Spain). Over the next few decades, they brought much of the Iberian peninsula under Berber rule, establishing strongholds in towns like Toledo, Talavera and Merida — where it’s still easy to find Berber architecture today.

For the next several centuries, the destinies of the Berbers would be inextricably bound up with those of rival Islamic dynasties warring for Spain and North Africa. Some Berber kings allied with powerful Umayyad caliphs, helping fend off Fatimid assassins; others rejected the old patterns of diplomacy and waged war against Umayyad rulers. The Hammudids, a caliphate of Berbers, battled the Umayyads, the Zirids, and their fellow Hammudids for Andalusian territory throughout the 1000s.

Meanwhile, down in North Africa, a powerful new Berber kingdom was taking shape.

The Almoravid dynasty, based in Morocco, snatched up much of southern Spain, fought off waves of attacks from Christian armies, and warred with the Wagadu (Ghana) empire to the south.

“The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage” by Eugène Delacroix, 1845

It was this war, it seems, that finally put an end to the Almoravid dynasty. The Wagadu warriors were no slouches themselves —proud sons of a vast, wealthy and tightly organized empire, these professionally drilled horsemen and archers attacked by the thousands, wreaking havoc not only on the battlefield, but on the entire ecosystem of the Northwest African plains.

The war stretched on for decades — and by the time it was over, vast stretches of grassland had been razed down to dirt. The delicate system of canals and farms, which the Berbers had cultivated since prehistory, lay in ruins; setting off a “disastrous process of desertification” that drove many formerly-urban Berbers out into the desert to pursue nomadic ways of life.

Yet some fertile areas survived and continued to prosper. The Almohad Caliphate, based in what’s now Morocco, continued to rule for more than a century—well into the 1200s—fighting successful battles against the Norman kings of Sicily, and even allying with Catholic kings of Castile in Spain. Like so many other great empires, the Almohads weren’t undone by any single factor, but by a combination of changing environment, loss of territory to enemies, and internal revolts by rebellious tribes.

One of these tribes, the Banu Marin, founded the Marinid dynasty, which rose to take the place of the Almohads. The Marinids were, in their turn, displaced by the Wattasids, who lost their kingdom to the Saadis, who were defeated by the Alouites—who ruled Morocco all the way up to the days of French colonialism, and ruled again when the country gained its independence in 1963. The current king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, is an Alouite.

Meanwhile, other Berber royal houses had been conquering neighboring areas—parts of what are today Libya and Algeria to the east, along with Mali and Mauritania to the west. In all these countries, Berbers still constitute large percentages of the population. In Mauritania, they constitute most of the ruling class.

And to this day, clans of Berber nomads still graze their camels and cows on the sparse grass; to water them at isolated oases and wells; to sleep beneath the stars in the shade of their ancestors’ mud-brick walls and palaces.

A modern Berber herdsman

These people who’ve been here since the Stone Age, who taught religious ideas to the ancient Egyptians, who fought with — and against — Phoenicians and Greeks and Romans, who conquered Spain and ruled as Muslim Caliphs… their descendants are still here, now, in Morocco and Algeria, in Libya and Tunisia, in Mauritania and Mali; speaking the same languages, still farming and herding and watering their camels at the same wells. And on cool desert nights, the air here still rings with the thumps of old drums and the clashes of old cymbals —

And the melodies that have been sung here since always.

The men and women who sing the old songs are still called Berbers, “barbarians,” by the ephemeral peoples who pass like shadows over their land, as so many shadows have passed over their stones for tens of thousands of years, and will pass for tens of thousands more.

]]>1046Great African Empires, Part 5: The Richest Man in Historyhttp://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/02/15/great-african-empires-part-5-richest-man-history/
Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:38:28 +0000http://thestrangecontinent.com/?p=1594His spending sprees were legendary. His entourage crashed whole cities’ economies. Meet the flashiest emperor in African history. Imagine a billionaire arriving with his entourage in London, or Las Vegas, or Rome; and completely taking over an entire city block— turning a five-star restaurant into his exclusive kitchen; a skyscraper into his private office; a…

Imagine a billionaire arriving with his entourage in London, or Las Vegas, or Rome; and completely taking over an entire city block— turning a five-star restaurant into his exclusive kitchen; a skyscraper into his private office; a museum into his personal art gallery. The CEO brings along hundreds of aides and assistants, all of them clad in designer clothes, driving luxury cars. At each stop along the way, he instantly turns ordinary people into millionaires with a single swipe of his credit card.

It’s hard to imagine any modern mogul willing to flash that kind of cash —

But that doesn’t even begin to describe Musa’s pilgrimage.

In the year 1327, the mansa (emperor) Musa Keita I of Mali decided to set off on hajj (pilgrimage) for Mecca. Adjusted for inflation, Musa’s personal fortune amounted to $400 billion — more than the GDP of Austria — making him the richest human being in all history.

According to eyewitnesses, Musa’s traveling entourage consisted of no less than 60,000 people — the population of a mid-sized town — including a “personal retinue” of 12,000 slaves, all clad in the finest Persian silk. The emperor himself rode on horseback; and in front of him walked 500 slaves, each of them carrying a staff adorned with gold. His baggage train of 80 camels carried 50 to 300 pounds of gold apiece.

Mansa Musa I

All this wealth wasn’t just for show. Along the journey — from his capital of Timbuktu, close to the heart of the old Wagadu Empire (whom we met in Part 4), through Cairo, across the Red Sea and into Arabia, Musa and his entourage spent gold lavishly at every stop, paying for the construction of at least 12 mosques. Legend had it that Musa commissioned a new mosque every single week — and although this is almost certainly an exaggeration, sources make it clear that he and his people did make enormous donations to the poor.

Musa’s spending attracted so much attention in Cairo that the sultan himself (Al-Malik al-Nāṣir) became annoyed — although that may have been for more practical reasons: Musa threw around so much gold in Cairo that the local currency dropped in value —

Creating a 12-year recession in Cairo’s economy.

It’s not hard to recognize this journey for what it truly was: an advertising campaign, broadcasting to the wider Muslim world — and to Europe — that a bold new power had risen in West Africa.

It worked. In Mecca, Musa rubbed shoulders with the royal elite of Islamic kingdoms throughout Europe and Asia, which — quite literally — stamped Mansa Musa on the map.

Who was this man — and who were his people? How did the Mali Empire amass such outrageous wealth, yet still find themselves so ignored that they had to stage a cripplingly expensive publicity stunt in order to get noticed?

The story begins with the fall of the Kingdom of Wagadu.

Remember, when we last left our Wagadu friends in the mid-1200s, they’d been worn down to exhaustion by years of all-out war against the Moroccan Almoravids and their Berber allies (whom you’ll meet in Part 6). The Wagadu Empire was rapidly falling apart; they were losing control of cities and trade routes every year, under constant attack by invading dynasties like the Sosso.

Deep within the Wagadu Kingdom was a province known as Manden. All the way back to the 1000s, Manden had been ruled by loyal kings known as faamas, who came from the Mandinka people (also known as the Malinke).

According to the Epic of Sundiata, the national epic of the Mandinka people, Manden’s real trouble started when Wagadu power began to crumble, and the Sosso dynasty invaded — levying impossible taxes on the Mandinka, kidnapping their women, and creating an atmosphere of terror in the land.

But in the early 1200s — just as the Kingdom of Wagadu was suffering its final collapse —

A great Mandinka hero was born.

Prince Sundiata gathered all 12 Manden kingdoms into an alliance, along with the core of the Wagadu army, as well as the army of a city-state called Mema. This alliance launched a fierce rebellion against the Sosso, scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Kirina, and expelled their enemies from the land. Sundiata was declared faama of faamas — and also mansa, emperor of all 12 kingdoms of the Manden alliance, including Mema and the remnants of Wagadu — at the age of 18.

The triumph of Sundiata

By the mid-1300s, Sundiata’s descendants, known as the Keita dynasty, had expanded their Mali Empire to encompass large parts of what’s now Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bassau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

— and certainly the wealthiest, ever seen in West Africa, before or since. The name of the Keitas has become synonymous with Mali in African history. In fact, even the current president of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, has the same surname taken by Sundiata.

The Mali Empire at its peak, circa 1337 CE

The mansas of Mali held their empire together using a very clever administrative approach (which also worked well for the Achaemenids and Sasanians in Persia): they trusted local rulers to run things at the village level, according to their own customs and laws.

Village elders reported to county administrators, who reported in turn to province governors, chosen by election. As long as the tax money kept flowing to Timbuktu, no problem. If a governor got a bit too greedy, though, the mansa himself might step in —

And install a more trustworthy administrator.

Like the Kushites (from Part 2), the Aksumites (from Part 3) and the Wagadu before them, the Mali Empire drew most of its wealth from trade. Since the Mali people were occupying many of the same lands as the Wagadu, it’s no surprise that they also mined enormous amounts of gold — and traded heavily in salt and copper, across the Sahara and along the West African coast.

The mansas put their vast wealth to practical use, imitating the Sahalo-Sudanese architectural style of their Wagadu predecessors — but carrying it to greater heights than ever before. Their sprawling palaces and mosques remain among the world’s largest surviving mud-brick buildings.

The Royal Palace of Timbuktu

This empire’s people spoke several distantly related languages, including Mandinka, Malinke, Fulani and Bozo. Although the state religion was unquestionably Islam, it’s unclear how much of the indigenous animistic religion survived among the common people, as it had survived under the Wagadu — and still survives in many areas of West Africa today.

Daily life in Timbuktu

Since the days of Sundiata, the Mali Empire’s military had been organized into 16 clans, each reporting to a ton-tigi or “quiver-master” — a feudal landowner rich enough to own a horse and armor. Beneath the ton-tigi, men known as kèlè-koun, “war-heads,” commanded the infantry, who may have numbered as many as 90,000 men at the empire’s peak.

They were famous for their javelins and fire-arrows.

By the 1400s, the military had grown into a tightly organized force led by land-owning knights called farariya, who led an entire hierarchy of warriors, each distinguished according to his rank by the cut of his trousers and the gold bracelets on his ankles. Infantry units were led by local clan chiefs, and individual fame clearly played a major part in military morale. In fact, Mali infantrymen prided themselves on carrying their own personalized weapons into battle, and relished opportunities to grapple with enemies face-to-face.

People in modern Mali still reenact the empire’s battles.

The imperial line of the Keitas reigned in splendor for about 300 years — but by the late 1500s, the cracks were starting to show. Every great empire collapses due to a wide range of interlocking causes, and the Mali Empire was no exception. The Kingdom of Songhai was rising in the north, swallowing up Mali territory, including the city of Mema. The Kaabu Empire appeared on the coast —

And began devouring the western provinces.

Perhaps not even a great mansa could have saved Mali from its fate — but Mansa Mahmud Keita III, who came to power in 1496, was far from great. He tried to forge an alliance with Portuguese traders — who, perhaps sensing that his empire was unravelling, chose not to partner with him. He lost numerous battles against the Songhai — spearheading a few successful counterattacks, but mostly getting pushed back toward Timbuktu.

Mahmud III’s successor, Mahmud Keita IV, handled the army much better. He equipped his troops with firearms for the first time in Mali’s history, and inflicted a string of serious defeats on the Songhai — and for a while, it looked like Mali and Songhai might share West Africa as rough equals.

In the end, though, the Mali Empire was undone not by external enemies, but by internal rivalries. Mahmud IV’s three sons — each claiming the title of mansa — fought for control of the empire, and tore it into three separate kingdoms. In 1630, a people known as the Bamana tore through those kingdoms, gutting the Manden cities and seizing control of the Niger River. The last generation of mansas fled their cities —

And the Kingdom of Manden was no more.

But the cities, the trade routes and the cultural core of Mali remained in place. Even as governments came and went, the cities, architectural styles, food, clothing and religion all remained firmly in place. Timbuktu is still an inhabited city in Mali, where people still speak the Mandinka, Maninke, Fulani and Bozo languages spoken in the days of the empire.